


Before, Since & After

by underwater_owl



Series: two creams, one sugar [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, BDSM, Consensual Sex, F/M, Handcuffs, Interrogation, Intimate Partner Violence, PTSD, Police Brutality, Safewords, Unplanned Pregnancy, alluded to assault (canon typical), police harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-03 00:11:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 45,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4079191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underwater_owl/pseuds/underwater_owl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max hacks on a mumbly little cough, ducks his head, and slips out. He likes the locals, but doesn’t much like the locals liking him back. The robust laughter, the claps on the back, the unsolicited advice about ‘those wild ones,’ son, makes his skin crawl.</p><p>The worst thing about it is he can feel himself buckling. With the travel, he’d always had this belief that if he found the right place, then all the rest of the shit wouldn’t catch back up. Like if he could run far enough, find the thing that fit him just right, he would stop feeling this. Rationally, he can see that the pressure to flee was nothing but a quick fix, a temporary anesthetic, that this has been coming for him for years now. If he stays in Citadel, and he does intend to stay in Citadel, that’s going to mean facing up to it.</p><p>God fucking help them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. once a cop

**Author's Note:**

> This story picks up during the last chapter of Blood, Coffee & Motor Oil. It will not make sense out of context and you should go there first.
> 
> WARNING: this sequel is going to contain similar themes as the last story, and as canon, but with perhaps more frustrating and ongoing depictions of inappropriate and abusive of power. If you need more specific content warnings please don't hesitate to ask. It will also contain more graphic depictions of anxiety, trauma, and panic.

He can feel himself avoiding thinking about that night.  
\---

Max Rockatansky did not think he could ever be happy making coffee for strangers, least of all in a cafe smaller than some big city walk-in closets. The truth is, he’s not sure how he feels about it.

He likes it better than the other things he’s tried in the long period he loosely defines as _since._ Since, he has been a temp in data entry firms, a worker on of the oil rigs just off the coast, and a drifter, with no address but the ‘great black beast,’ as Furiosa has taken to referring to it.

It was only when the car broke down that he took the job as a barista. He’d phoned every ad for help wanted put out in the local paper, and this was the one that had called back. Using the last cash in his pocket, he’d arranged a tow to what can only charitably called the ‘town’ of Citadel- really more of an accident of rural sedimentation rather than any sort of actual result of city planning. Nux had given him the job, in a fit of either bad judgement, intimidation or sentimentality, and Max had picked a few of the rental flyers off the church billboard.

It wasn’t long until he was taking his first morning shift at the coffee shop, supervising the installation of a milk steamer, and fending off the prickly locals with a practiced expression of dismissal.

‘Well done, Rockatansky, not likely to have her back as a customer,’ he’d thought, the first time Furiosa walked out his door.

Max fully acknowledges that about a lot of things in life, he is dead wrong.

\---

But it goes like this.

Max gets the phone call at six thirty three pm. He knows this, because his phone is next to the clock radio, which keeps good time and keeps him in his habit, from the days on the force, of mentally marking the hour and minute of things like this. The clock has just rolled over its’ little spinning numbers when Furiosa tells him, her voice as steady and true as a general in the field;

“Come pick me up. I’m at work. It happened. Bring a first aid kit.”

He’d moved without thinking, grabbed the kit from the kitchen cupboard, grabbed his keys, hit the car and flown through town to come find her, locked in her office, concussed, bleeding, in a kind of mild shock and gripping an illegally modified shotgun like it was all that stood between her and death. For all he’d known in that moment, it could have been true.

He’d put her in his car, brought her into his house, and drawn on first aid training he hadn’t had to think about in years.

The only part of it that Max remembers differently from Furiosa is the interaction with the cops.

He phones the emergency dispatch at 000, and with just enough heat and agitation in his voice, calls to report an assault. He does it from the front hall, while she sits in the kitchen, out of earshot. He identifies himself by name, identifies that the victim was his girlfriend (not partner, not a conversation they’ve ever had together, but this is _impression management_ it isn’t time to fuck around.)

He waits until the officers arrive on scene, and moves out fast to meet them on the lawn. Max plays his limp up as he walks out to them, so _why’d you quit_ is never a question that crosses their minds. He shakes both their hands and says _cop_ with his shoulders, _cop_ with his nod. Names the station where he used to work, calls himself officer and then winces like he’s made a slip, adds the _retired,_ ruefully, and has them in the palm of his hand.

“What happened?” Asks the first one, giving him a chance to give the first impression, rather than Furiosa, who is still sitting concussed on the front porch and more in need of this from him than he has ever seen her.

“Attempted robbery.” he says with a wince, a shake of his head that means _commiseration,_ he knows their job, how much harder it is because of things like this, “couple of small timers tried to get past her into her shop, only they knocked her keys flying and panicked. Sloppy work, really rushed, but they threw her around. She’s a hell of a woman, though.”

An appreciative look, a regretful pause. The cop to his left looks at her, looks at him, says;

“What, she’s with you?”

People misread Furiosa as a lesbian often. Max has never been perturbed by it, knowing that it certainly doesn’t bother her. Tonight, rather than laughing at the man, he just nods, like he’s sheepish.

“She’d murder me for asking you to go easy on her, there’s no way in hell she’d admit she’s shaken up, but.”

And just like that, they want to protect his old lady as much as he apparently does.

For her part, Furiosa delivers the story beautifully. She looks cold and angry and stung, like she’s mad it happened and mad she didn’t grind them into dust for coming near her. They see her through his eyes, through the protective hand he rests on her shoulder, the adoration and admiration he has for her, the transfixed look on his face, which he doesn’t have to fake.

“We might, might be able to get something with the Corolla,” the younger one tells him, out in the yard, “but if it was stolen...”

“Yeah, I know.” Max agrees, ducking his head in a nod. “Don’t worry. She knows not to expect anything, either. Just thought we’d hate to be a missing part in a pattern, in case these two creeps try it on again.”

The young man’s eyes shine in gratitude, admiration, and with the familiar, cloying pity and fear that Max has learned to expect when he has to run this particular game. _There but for the grace of God go I,_ thinks the cop, the younger of the two partners. The older one can barely bring himself to look at Max, he’s so fucking afraid of that kind of loss. He doesn't even know the half of it.

Max gives the bonnet of their car a tap before they pull out, and they chirp the siren at him just once, a friendly farewell as they pull out and away from him, as fast as they can stand.

\---

The talking exhausts him. Truly, it _exhausts_ him, on a level so profound he can barely justify it, even to himself. 

It's because he's out of practice. He has little snatches with the girls, where they need something explained, where they have something they want to know, but that’s different. He’s allowed to forsake as many words as he likes, there, and has no expectation put on him. Ms Brown barely asks him a thing at all, just orders him and Dag around like she’s their unit commander. Nux talks, but doesn’t really need to be talked _back_ to. Then there’s Furiosa, who for whatever reason, an accident of adoration and a fundamental kind of similarity, seems to always give him energy, where everyone else just takes. Before all them, it was the road alone, miles and miles of it without seeing another solitary soul.

Put simply, nothing in the last seven years has remotely prepared him for having to talk to people like that, to lie so fluently. He feels like he’s worked out muscles he hasn’t used in ages, trying to be that man again, even for just an hour.

He barely sleeps the whole night, stays close to her in the bed, so he can check that she’s there when he inevitably starts awake again and again, dreaming the same dream, the same figure in the same road, each time with a different face. Jessie, Furiosa, Dag, Sprog, standing in a spray of headlights, until the last time he wakes up in an absolute cold sweat, and goes to the kitchen to get them coffee.

\---

They’re together. The townsfolk know it. Rumour swirls around, about how long it’s been going on, about the look on his face the day ‘those druggies’ had come after her at the garage, as he’d crossed the town to get her. Debbie winks and asks him if they can all expect a nice church wedding.

Max hacks on a mumbly little cough, ducks his head, and slips out of her shop. He likes the locals, but doesn’t much like the locals liking him back. The robust laughter, the claps on the back, the unsolicited advice about ‘those wild ones,’ son, makes his skin crawl. In the eyes of the people in this town, they are kids, settling down together, to be chided and set straight and given advice, open for conversation or for commentary. He endeavours to become used to it, because this place is Furiosa’s home.

Someday, he thinks, home for him too.

\---

Midmorning or so, Dag and Ms Brown can’t wait any longer, and take his living room by storm. He lets them in, with a hushed;

“Resting.”

So they’ll know to keep their voices down, and not to wake her. They speak softly instead, but in urgent, high whispers, demanding to know what the hell happened, what she’s told him, who could have done such a thing.

He relays the story for them, aware that some supply inside himself had been used up last night, that the words come out choppy and stilted, and sometimes not in the way he means them, but they know him. Dag keeps up a sort of running translation for Ms Brown, who is less used to Max’s peculiar code, under her breath, _he means they don’t know where the knife fell. They called the police to keep from raising too many questions. It went well with the cops, he took care of it._

Ms Brown nods along, seamlessly processing both streams of dialogue, and leaves, with Dag in tow and a pat on Max’s hand, as powerful a reassurance from her as he could ask for.

Dag runs back over later, with a shoulder holster on under her fall jacket, and a pie, for when Furiosa wakes up. Max takes the dish from her, then adjusts the coat and the rig underneath it, so it lies more smoothly and such that she’ll actually be able to draw it in a hurry, if she needs to. She submits patiently to the attention, nods her thanks, and slips back out again, across the road, to where Ms Brown is- and Max hopes to god that if it does come to shooting, it’ll be the older woman who gets the gun in hand first, because right now Dag is too green to stand even a chance.

\---

He’s trying not to think that way. This is the end of a war, not the beginning of one. If the story, as he’s pieced it out, is true, then it makes sense for the violence to end here.

What Constable Rockatansky knows is this;

When he arrived in town, Furiosa was mourning the death of a friend, and looking for boxes to pack her effects. Likely, a tenant of the house, and therefore a woman fleeing an abusive relationship. The name he has for her is ‘Splendid,’ but knows that like Cheedo, Dag, Toast, Capable, that is unlikely to be what it says on her birth records.

Second, Furiosa clearly carried a fair load of guilt around the death, suggesting that the system had in some way failed this girl.

Third item; her unexplained hatred and loathing of Immortan Joe, clear interest in his legal proceedings, and graphic fantasies of murder brought up again last night. Obviously, Joe is linked in some way to the source of Furiosa’s frustrations.

Then, the voicemail. Easy. Furiosa had hid Joe’s wife, girlfriend, person of interest, and said person had been killed while staying at the house. Furiosa blamed herself, and blamed Joe, though the case wasn’t with the state- likely a lack of evidence. Joe, in whatever process he had used to discover the woman, had discovered something of Furiosa’s role in keeping her from him as long as she had.

When she’d received it, Furiosa had obviously begun preparing herself for some kind of hell and a half. She’d moved to cover her vulnerabilities, the girls. She’d begun to fortify, with the help of Dag and Ms Brown. 

He kicks himself now for not realizing that the move would come against her at the shop. It’s the sort of thing that hindsight makes simple. If they’d had her listed there, then why the hell would they have bothered to track her down at her house? If they’d had her home phone number, they’d have called it instead, and her home address isn’t out there all that readily. It would have taken work to track it down.

Max knows this, because he did a fairly thorough information search on Furiosa back when he stole that look in her drivers license in the post office. She’s right about one thing, and that’s name and birthdates and their usefulness in searching people up. (Though with a name as distinctive as hers he probably could have done just fine without the date.)

He runs through most of this in his head as they sit together on the kitchen floor, after her bad spell in the bathroom and the conversation about her kidneys. Even in her panic, she doesn’t strike him as weak, just like a badly destabilized chemical reaction, a powerful crackle of released ions, a short and intense flash of light, as her system releases whatever it needs to in order to come back to harmony.

But yes, he _likes_ the coffee shop.

The data entry had made his skin crawl, made him stir crazy, and anyways, he hadn’t fit properly in the office chair they’d put him in, but most of all he'd scared his coworkers. Every temp job he'd ever had he'd been thrown back into the pool within a week.

The offshore oil rig had been a salty, damp version of hell. Years were swallowed up that way. Hard work in the days, shivering cold burnt out nights, and he’d liked that there had been no dreaming out there, but it had felt like there had been no thought, either. It felt like the month the department shrink put him on the little white pills, that left his mouth full of chalk and his head full of nothing.

He’d done it like most of the workers, some weeks on, some weeks off, until even in the time off the numb feeling had stuck with him, until when he was on, the crash of the machines sounded an awful lot like the roars of engines, and the crash of metal on metal felt like death coming. He’d saved his last few paychecks, pushed out a hard few months, working non-stop, and then hit the road.

On that money, plus a little labour here and there on the side, he’d lived just fine for nearly three years. If it weren’t for the major engine repairs and the wires finally going at the same time, he might have been able to go a while longer. The job in Citadel was going to be a tide-me-over, a place to earn a little cash to fix up the car, and promised himself six months tops before he’d hit the road again.

It’s six months since he limped into Citadel, six months to the very _day,_ when Furiosa phones him from her garage, shaken and in need.

He knows he isn’t going anywhere, not for some time yet.

\---

Every doctor he has ever had, and he’s been forced to a shrink or two in his time, he really has, has said that there will be good days and bad, and that stress will make it worse. This is true of his leg, and this is true of his head.

His leg is not stressed. It’s been fine, since he stopped doing the walk to the grocery store, since five weeks into town, the first time Furiosa found him out there, glared at him, and told him to get on her bike. The shop requires only the barest of physical labour from him, the garden work at Ms Brown’s is mostly languid and stationary (when there are no cherry trees to be planted) and he feels better than he has since the car hit him.

His head, not so much.

One thing he notices is that things come in short and strange burst and fragments, interactions turning into long, hyperlucid stretches that hurtle by with his heart pounding, until he ‘comes to’ on the other side of them.

He fixates on her, but tries not to, because she’ll have no patience for it. He worries she’ll think he means to condescend, and tries to say it to her, after dinner on the second day. She hasn’t opened her shop back up, hasn’t felt compelled to go too much further than his front porch, and sits out there with him that day at dawn, hand curled around a cup of his coffee, sleeve of one of his sweatshirts pushed up her arm, the other, hanging empty, tucked neatly inside out, folded inside with her. They're at a dead even height, but he's so much bulkier, broader than her that she’s swimming in the thing.

“I don’t mean this to be-.”

He doesn’t know how to finish. He needn’t have worried. Without looking at him, with her eyes closed and the light of the sunset on her face, Furiosa yawns and says;

“I’m not going to get angry at you for coddling me when you’re doing what I’ve asked for. I’m never going to get angry at you, ever, for sometimes getting scared.” She swings her chair around, and props her bare feet into his lap, to get them off the cool damp wood of the porch. Max presses his hands together, warming her toes between them, and her smile stretches a little wider.

He is torn, constantly, between thinking she cannot possibly have any idea of what she does to him, and believing she knows him down to the core of his being, and wrecks purposeful, glad chaos in him, because she herself is incandescent and expects the same of others.

It’s a while after that before his heartbeat feels normal in his chest.

\---

The third day after the attack, dawn finds them out on the porch once more. Another day of hookie for her, a normal Monday for him, and a morning spent out together breathing in the cool, clean air of fall. The sun comes up high before either of them is ready to speak, to move. Max’s stomach rumbles first, so he slips to his feet, and reaches out to give her shoulder a squeeze, before padding inside to make sandwiches.

Her silhouette in the doorway behind him isn’t a surprise.

“Last day,” she says, “before I get back to it.”

What is surprising is that, with the door still wide behind her clever fingers start opening the buttons of his borrowed shirt, until it slips open, down past her stomach. He can see the bruising now, so vivid it makes him swallow. She watches him, and with narrowed, careful eyes, and pauses, hand resting over her navel.

“If you can’t yet, we won’t.”

Max thinks it over, and then goes to her, draws her in, and shuts the door firmly behind her. Then, more cave-man than he normally lets himself be, than she’d normally tolerate, (but it makes her laugh today) he lifts her up carefully into his arms and carries her off to the bed.

\---

The worst thing about it is he can feel himself buckling. With the travel, he’d always had this belief that if he found the _right place,_ then all the rest of the shit wouldn’t catch back up. Like if he could run far enough, find the thing that fit him just right, he would stop feeling this, stop seeing those faces. Apparently, that isn’t true. Rationally, he can see that the pressure to flee was nothing but a quick fix, a temporary anesthetic, that this has been coming for him for years now. If he stays in Citadel, and he does intend to stay in Citadel, that’s going to mean facing up to it.

God fucking help them both.


	2. good girl

Max’s place has been a glorious reprieve, the kind of soft landing she had worked for years to provide to others, but never expected to need herself. 

It’s humbling in a way, to be the target of violence, and to experience in her own body. Furiosa has had the victims of domestic violence living under her roof for years, and has witnessed about every single response to trauma imaginable. If you had stopped her on the street two day ago and tried to tell her that a woman who got shoved into a wall, slashed with a knife, concussed, was weak for crying about it, there would have been a heated exchange.

In her self, she apparently has less tolerance. 

Furiosa considers herself to be teflon, considers herself to be tough as fucking nails. She has evidence to back this up. She has a lifetime behind her of rough situations and near misses, of rough outcomes and hard lessons. She has broken bones, she has bled, she has been in fights and she has even fought for her life.

But, being perfectly honest, in the last two decades of her adult life, she has never been attacked quite like this. Mugged and jumped and even cold cocked, absolutely, but never hit from behind by two professionals. After living through the violence of her adolescence, and maturing into the woman she has become, she had thought she had outgrown her tears, had hardened herself against the shakes. She thought that she needed no one else.

(She still needs no one, a mental amendment- Max is nice, but this would be okay if she were doing it in her own apartment, all alone. What she had really thought was that the coming down afterwards wouldn’t feel any different, whether she was alone or not, that she would be indifferent to the support. But that is most certainly not the case.)

Furiosa never, ever expected that _she_ would be one of the ones who would need a good long break, even perhaps the tiniest bit of a cry. It makes her see, in a way, that perhaps part of her has thought of these women as a little bit _weak_ for their tears, after all. That she may, quite unconsciously, have set herself apart from the others.

Thinking about this, she sees something else. Furiosa has been learning to fight since she was just a girl. A lot of the trouble she has nearly been in has been avoided, by quick thinking, good reflexes, and a hell of a strong right hook. By arming herself, by removing the girls from the house, by remaining so careful and vigilant, she had really believed that she was going to be able to prevent this attack before it occurred, that there was no way they could catch her unawares. That because she was stronger, this would be different somehow.

It’s part of the insidious logic that swirls and trickles and oozes and comes back around in the end to _you just didn’t fight hard enough, you just didn’t do enough to stop it happening, did you?_

It’s a deeply uncomfortable conclusion to come to. A part of her finds herself not only tired, and hurt, but also ashamed. The women in her life do not deserve to be seen like this, by even this deep and hidden part of her.

She lies in Max’s bed, and considers what to do about it.

\---

Furiosa deliberately takes longer than her conscience wants to let her. _Get back to work,_ her every instinct screams, _get your feet back under you._

She stubbornly stays in Max’s home, drinks a luxurious amount of his coffee, and peruses the books on his shelves. She plays games, trying to guess which are his own and which belong to the Millers and were inherited with the furniture. Car circuitry is about the only one she gets right. Local history turns out to be theirs, local birdwatching turns out to be his, and the old hardcore dystopic scifi literature is apparently half and half- the Millers have a lot of it, but he reads chapters of it throughout the day in his quiet minutes, and has an amazon.au order in place for a few of the sequels.

Living with someone, you learn a lot about them, even if it only is for a few days.

\---

Other things Furiosa learns about Max, living with him;

He does not like the taste or the smell of vegemite, and is resistant to all attempts to bring it into his house.

He’s a fastidious housekeeper, except in his education on the topic had apparently missed the laundry segment on separating darks from lights. Easy for him, maybe, since his wardrobe is exclusively darks. Not a problem for her, the clothes she came in have tears and bloodstains in them.

Except, yes, he manages to not only bleach the bloodstains out of her white racerback tanktop, but also to charmingly and neatly darn up the slash. He leaves it for her, cleaned, folded, and so kindly mended, on the foot of the bed to discover on her own.

She learns Max probably needs to go to an optometrist. When he reads, he holds the book up close to his face, eyes squinting up to make out the words of the print.

But, if he gets glasses, he will likely lose them. Unexpectedly, Max is someone who puts things down in fits of absentia, and frequently goes searching for them again just a few minutes later. 

He has a case of what Toast calls ‘male pantry blindness,’ an unfair generalization but a funny one; the inability to spot a still object in a room, no matter if it’s right under his nose. Particularly likely to manifest while looking in his own fridge and pantry. The milk is constantly ‘hidden’ in the fridge, even though the only one that takes it out or puts it away is him.

He does not watch television, does not listen to the radio, does not play music. Max abhors background noise of any kind, and has a keen sense of hearing. He knows where she is, in any given room, at any given time, by just the creak of the floorboards under her feet, the shift of a chair as she settles down into it, or the sounds of the springs in his mattress.

\---

They have Capable and Nux over for a late night bite to eat. Furiosa doesn’t know Nux as well as she would like, precisely because he works the nights to Max’s days- when he is in the shop she is hardly ever in it, generally being occupied in some way with the other employee of the Open Road. They met for those dinners, before the shit hit the fan with Joe’s phone call, and they sometimes run into one another at Capable’s nights playing in the bar. Both of those occasions are loud, and boisterous, and it has been easy to see him there without ever really spending much time speaking to him.

It doesn’t help that she still intimidates the hell out of Nux, that he knows it, she knows it, and it can be hard to make small talk with something like that hanging in the air.

It’s why it’s surprising that the evening goes as well as it does. Max and Nux talk a little quiet shop, sorting out the weekly schedules, a small inventory of whatever ordering needs to be done. Capable sits Furiosa down and looks over her injuries with a motherly and critical eye.

“You’ll have that for about a week,” she guesses, looking at now-green marks along her stomach, with a sympathetic wince that speaks of long experience. All Furiosa’s girls are far too familiar with bruises. “I’m going to bring some arnica by, and some witch hazel. Those will both help.”

Furiosa gives her a hug, and a kiss on the cheek, and makes her sit down and tell her about the pregnancy.

Capable is something like two months along now, they aren’t sure- and Furiosa isn’t sure either, but it is heavily alluded to that there was a failure of one sort of another in one or more kinds of birth control. When Capable and Nux look at each other, they are both somehow sheepish and incredibly excited.

“Living together is.” Nux tries to start, and then ends up taking a bite of his food, too bashful to continue, while Capable just nods her agreement.

After the last two days, Furiosa thinks she knows what they mean, but doesn’t envy them. What may work well for Capable and Nux is too much, too hasty for her. She knows that soon, she’s out of here.

“We’re looking for a bigger place to move into together before the baby comes, but worst comes to worst we can keep our eyes open while she’s still not walking, sleep her at the foot of the bed.”

“You could think about co-sleeping,” answers Max, to her utmost surprise, Max who as far as she knows, knows nothing about children, had probably never wanted children, has had a small surgical intervention so that he cannot have children. He catches the way Nux and Capable are looking at him, too, with just as much bafflement as Furiosa, and slips out to go put the coffee on.

No. There is no comparing her and Max in any way to these open-faced and smiling kids, a little scared, a little wild over each other, a little ill-advised but sure going to try.

\---

As hard as it is to do, Furiosa gets up on the last morning, and walks out the door with him. He walks her to work, and sees her into the office. There’s a little cleaning up to do. Her prosthetic is still here, has been lying here the entire time, apparently (how hadn’t she missed it?) and she settles it back onto her body, before going to help him with the clean up. Some number of papers had been strewn about, in her search for the phone.

“There’s going to be a knife, somewhere outside, near the steps.” She murmurs, as she realphabetizes a few scattered files. It’s amazing how much of a mess there is, considering they never made it through the door. She thinks she did more damage than they did. “Could you see if you can find it?”

He slips out to do as she asks. She doesn’t want to see it, and he doesn’t make her, and she stores this feeling, again, to draw from the next time one of her residents has a topic that they just aren’t ready to go near, just not yet.

\---

Her first day back in the shop, she fixes the damage to her prosthetic. It’s only minor, comparatively nothing at all, one jarred strip of metal that just needs to be pushed back into shape and then back into place.

From there, it’s return her phone messages, and then catch up on the two cars that have been here to languish an extra few days now. She fixes both, calls the owner of the first to check that he’s in, and drives it out to his place. He gives her a lift back into town. It’s how she always works it for the people who don’t have a second car and a second person to get them into town to see her, to be able to properly pick up a car. No taxis out here, after all, and it’s a hell of a walk for some of them.

Ace Dubeau is the kind of Citadel resident who’s out here because he gets into too many arguments to live in the city, or else because his family has been here forever and always. They have spoken twice, once when he yelled at her for leaving some scrap salvage too close to the edge of the garage lot, almost four years ago, and a second time when he stopped in to drop the car off. Ace, she once heard remark to another man, behind one of the small racks at Debbie's, categorizes people into two groups; those idiots who eat out in a restaurant more than once a month, and those who know better. All the way back to the shop, the whole drive, he smokes furiously and gives her sideways looks.

He is gruff, and he is territorial, and he gives her fiercely approving grumbles as he drops her off. Hands her cash out the car window for the job and says;

“Heard you broke his arm.”

“Dislocated,” Furiosa corrects, “I think. Broke the other one’s fingers.”

Ace considers this, and after a moment gives a determined nod, and tells her;

“Good girl.”

Approval she never thought she’d earn in her life, honestly, but she’ll take it.

\---

Ms Brown takes out the stitches for her, later in the week, with Dag sitting wide eyed at the other end of the table. 

"Are you drinking the bourbon for the pain?" She asks, chewing her fingernails, a bad habit she's been picking up lately.

"No," says Furiosa, "it actually doesn't really hurt. I'm drinking bourbon because I like bourbon, and for no other reason than it's been one of those weeks. Now do you want some?"

Dag thinks about it for a moment, then pours herself a bit, like she isn't sure she's really allowed. Furiosa pinches the bridge of her nose, and Ms Brown sits back, with a satisfied look on her face. She sets down her tweezers, ungloves her hands, and announces, contentedly;

"Good as new. Good on you, for picking a beau who knows how to do as fine field stitching as I've ever seen."

"Yeah," Furiosa agrees, "and may it _never_ come in handy again."

"Things aren't normally this--?" Dag asks, and the unfinished question probably means ends with some variation of complicated, horrible, and violent, but no matter what, Furiosa shakes her head, easily. No, they aren't.

"It's never followed us this close before." Ms Brown agrees. "And it ain't likely to again. Joe's done for, and done with _her,_ from what we can best tell. Lesson, he thinks, quite learned. And none of you others have ever had a man after you with that much sway. Bad men, yeah, and even rich ones- but no one likely to hire muscle and take out a hit. That was certainly new."

Valkyrie, Furiosa knows, is thinking about doing something about the People Eater, and doing something serious- but that isn't the kind of thing that Dag needs to end up a potential accomplice to. Instead, she sips her drink, and rubs her fingertips over the healed cut.

"No lasting harm done. Just one more for the collection, hey?"

Like this, sitting at the well lit kitchen table, there isn't any pretending she isn't a mess of scars. Ms Brown has seen her naked dozens of times, so just snorts, but Dag sits up and looks interested.

Furiosa can see her wanting to ask, so offers, tracing the next lowest down, a starburst in the tissue of her left breast;

"Flew off the bike and hit some debris." And, tracing her fingertips a slow dip lower, to a ragged mark on her ribs. "Drunk guy with a broken beer bottle. He wasn't even aiming at me, he was just trashed and trying to get into it with the bouncer."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Now this-" touching the outside of her other arm, "-this was a bad one. This was a Rottweiler. And what's worst, I got it being stupid, sneaking around someone else's grow-op when I was a kid."

A white lie, but it takes the serious look of Dag's face and makes her eyes crinkle as she smiles. She tries to sip the drink, and only coughs a very little. Furiosa pulls her top back on, and stretches, leaning back in her seat. The fate of the second arm is not questioned, and Furiosa does not offer explanations of any kind.

"Do you have any tattoos?" Dag asks, curiously, and Furiosa shakes her head.

"When I was at an age where I wanted to, I never could get the money together."

Dag nods, and glances at Ms Brown, who Furiosa knows for a _fact_ wears ink, but apparently chooses not to volunteer that information this particular afternoon. 

"You know, Cee has my name tattooed on his shoulder," Dag admits, sipping her drink again. Furiosa makes it a point not to ask about the men from before her girls came to her, but sits up with interest at this, more because the look on Dag's face is a peculiar one; halfway regretful, halfway full of schadenfreude. "He tried to talk me into it, too, and I pretended to be too afraid of the needles. I might get one now, then, if I could think of something that wasn't corny."

Ms Brown nods for a moment, looking contemplative, and Furiosa thinks that she's going to show her own off, or maybe make a suggestion. She chokes a little on her bourbon when the old woman says, instead;

"Valkyrie says Max has one or two."

"Well," Furiosa says, when she has her breath back, "then I suppose you're going to have to ask him about it some time, aren't you?"

Max has a tattoo, in scratchy blue ink that looks like it might have been a professional, or might have been a man sitting over him in the dark of night. It looks like it's been with him for the better part of a decade, and is so faded as to be practically illegible. When she brushes her fingers over the ink, she doesn't think he can honestly tell, because his back arches up under her hand just the same as it does for any other touch.

The intimacy of this thought apparently shows on her face more than she would want it to, because Ms Brown and Dag are both grinning at each other, and grinning at her, in near fits of silent, warm laughter. Furiosa opens her mouth, prepared to get a little defensive, but Ms Brown pulls rank and holds up her hand to forestall the words.

"We're happy to see you happy, that's all. We like that you have a man who does such nice, neat field stitches."

Later, when Dag is already in bed, and when it's just Furiosa and Ms Brown sitting at the table together, so goes ahead and talks about it, admits some of the things that she normally never would, because they're private, he has a right to keep them private. But she has a right to talk them through, too, and she trusts Ms Brown with her life, trusts her discretion and trusts her judgement.

"He's shellshocked." She says, because it's somehow less of a violation, in her head, as she admits it, than saying what she really thinks, giving the correct, clinical term. "I feel like I should get a book on loving someone that shellshocked."

"Maybe you should," Ms Brown agrees, unexpectedly, "and maybe he is. It might help you to feel more in control if you understand it a little better. But d'you want to hear what I think? Of course you do."

Furiosa sighs, and closes her blurry eyes.

"I think, if you're learning this stuff about him now, it's on account of him letting you learn it. And if you have him feeling safe enough to let some of it all unspool."

"I don't know how he can possibly-"

"Don't be stupid, girl." Ms Brown interrupts her, finishing off the last of her drink. "You trust him too. Don't matter what you haven't told one another yet. Just keep letting him do it, and keep the steel in your spine. He's a smart man, he'll get most of it done on his own, if you can just keep being it for him. I like him."

God, they're both a little drunk. Ms Brown pats Furiosa's shoulder now. Repeats once more;

"Good field stitches. Now go to bed. It's been one of those weeks."

\---

There’s another Ford parked down the block. It isn’t Max’s- a much newer model than that. It doesn’t belong to any of the town residents. She doesn’t think much of it at the time, except that she wonders if they’ll bring it in for a tune up. She likes working on Fords these days.

To her credit, it does _occur_ to her that it might be one of Joe's men coming back for her- but just that morning she'd got (and was still processing) the news about his death, so she is prepared to accept that the threat there has passed, and that the time spent needing to be careful, to be worried, is over. If the car is not one of Joe's, then the car cannot be a problem, after all.


	3. dissociate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: the most explicit writing around panic occurs in this chapter.

Furiosa goes back to her shop, and to living in her own home. Max fills up with a kind of restless, drumming energy that he hasn’t had in a long time. He takes the car out with Dag, takes them out onto a stretch of flat, hard ground, and makes her drive them into skid after controlled skid, until she can get her wheels back under her as easy as can be. She takes to driving faster than she took to the gun, and takes him back home with the windows down, her newly healed arm hanging out the side, fingers spread open to the evening air. Her hair jellyfishes in the breeze around them, a white blond mess.

“I just don’t like that they got to her.” Dag eventually says. “And that we can’t do a thing about it, now that he’s dead.”

He doesn’t know her well enough to tell her what he’d told Furiosa, about it being the wrong road to take. But then, Dag doesn’t mean it the way Furiosa does, not yet. Her idle protestations are far further away from translating into bloody battles. So Max sighs an agreement, and looks out the windshield, as Citadel comes back into view.

When Max and Dag drive down the main street, the lights are on at the garage, even though it’s late. Dag pulls up out front, and leans out the window. Max shifts forward, peering around her, and sees the office lit up bright, lamp on inside. Furiosa is working late, having an apparently grim conversation onto one of her burner mobiles.

“Better leave her,” he tells Dag, gently. She sighs a slow agreement and draws back into the car, starting them up once more and taking him back to his place, where they still live across the street from one another.

\---

The first time Max met Furiosa, he had been sure he would never see her again. In perverse answer to that expectation, she had turned up in his shop again five hours later, for a cup of coffee with Toast. In the full daylight, with the dirt of a half-day’s hard work already on her skin, he’d changed his impression of her ever so slightly. 

At first she had been a non-person, a customer, an obstacle. Watching the way she’d watched him in the window, something in his mind had clicked into place, put two and two together; _this is the kind of person you don’t meet very often._

He’d caught her staring, and she’d leaned up against his counter like she couldn’t give a damn if he knew she’d looked. A clever cock to her hip, a contemplative tilt to her head. She’d relaxed so aggressively there, so ferociously unintimidated.

So for the record, then, he was interested before he was attracted to her, but only by a measure of about thirty seconds. Considering how infrequently Max is either interested in _or_ attracted to anyone at all, meeting Furiosa that afternoon in his shop had been fucking revelatory.

\---

The nice thing about starting his day with the coffee shop is that there’s a morning routine. He always showers at night, because the daytimes are so hot in Citadel, which means that he can wake up at 5:35 am, roll out of bed and into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, get his boots on and make the walk over to the shop, all before 5:50. 

Max brings the newspaper in with him in the mornings. They’re too far out for actual delivery of anything that isn’t the local rag, so he has to pick up the day’s paper from Debbie’s at the end of the day- sometimes two every second day, if things get a little odd on the delivery route, which they seem to often. He lets himself in, turns on the lights, starts the first pot of coffee for the day, and goes to set out the pastries and snacks that they sell while the percolator hums and bubbles. He spends his morning reading about the world, a day or two out of step with the rest of it.

If no customers show up by the time 6:15 rolls around, he has the first cup for himself, and opens the paper up. Any time between 6:30 and 7 am, Furiosa comes in, except Thursday mornings, where she never makes it any earlier than 8:40 or so. Wednesday, he has pieced together, is the night with the girls, and Wednesday keeps her up late.

The first Thursday after they’ve moved out, and after she’s moved home, he’s shocked to see her up bright and early. She looks disoriented to be there, like she’s miscounted the number of steps on the stairs and tried to climb up an extra one, found nothing but air and stumbled. But of course, with Capable, Cheedo and Toast scattered across various nearby houses and townships, there is no one for her to sit up too late with on Wednesday.

“I forgot that it would be different this week, it somehow just didn’t occur to me” she tells him, taking some time, since she has it to spare today, “but next Wednesday, I’m getting them in for a dinner party or something.”

Max nods his approval, and tops up her coffee.

\---

The house is a lot more quiet than it used to be. Ms Brown goes home, but Dag still lives with her. So does Toast- moving home with a glint of tears in her eyes and a murmured suggestion that Cheedo was a lovely, straight girl, and that she would do fine on her own, but if Toast was going to be fine she needed to live with someone considerably less straight, or at the very least someone straight but whom she didn’t think about in terms of being quite so lovely.

Furiosa pulls Toast to her chest with an ease of expression that Max envies. He just pats her on the shoulder, which Toast seems to appreciate enough. She wipes her nose off on her sleeve, slings her suitcase over her shoulder, and says;

“Well, that’s me for bed then,” before plodding upstairs, back to her old rooms.

And while he hurts for her, a little bit, he’s mostly glad that she’s back, because Furiosa looks calmer as her house fills up, returned to her normal poise and her usual clarity of purpose. Her ease helps erode the very last of his persistent feeling of dread, whose absence leaves him feeling a little hollowed out, a little shivery.

Furiosa just looks him over, gives him one of her softer smiles, and takes him by the hand to lead him up to her house. There, Furiosa pushes him into her bed and climbs in with him, and they sleep next to one another, just sleep, until dawn.

\---

She’s up before him the next morning, and he wakes to the lovely sight of her standing naked in the sunlight at her window. She turns, when she hears the groan he makes in his throat, stretching, sitting up, straightening his bad knee out. It’s seized up a little in the night.

She slips onto the bed, down at the foot, and he asks, helplessly curious;

“You don’t worry someone will see you?”

Because she isn’t body-shy, far from, but she’s a private woman, in a ferocious sort of way. But she smiles at him now, and reaches for his calf, and does something clever with her fingers, a deep pressure that makes his eyes roll back ever so slightly in his head, sends him falling onto his back in her pillows.

“You still don’t really understand living out here. If we walked out there together, naked as jays, we could go thirty miles that direction before we’d see another soul.”

She gives a jerky nod to indicate the direction away from the town.

“The road up here, the girls will walk it if they need me in an emergency. Other than that, there’s no one to see us but the lizards and the birds.”

Max makes a weak sound of agreement, though she may have to take him out there like that one day, to make him really understand it.

In the mean time, she asks;

“Tell me a little bit more about this leg?”

Shockingly, for the first time, he finds that he can. In the context of her fingers pressing delicately into his calf, slowly massaging out tension and pain, it comes pouring out of him.

“Three surgeries, first two a year apart, second one a couple of weeks after that, beginning eight years back. Leg was run over by a car. The knee is plastic, and angry with me. Muscles around it aren’t much pleased, either. Strain, tension.”

She hums her understanding, and leans forward to begin to do something about both.

Furiosa works from his toes up. Because she has one hand, it doesn’t feel quite like the other times someone has tried to do this for him, not like the abortive attempts at physiotherapy he’d submitted to in the first year after, back when he still knew what he wanted to do with his days and that thing involved the full use of both legs. It feels good, incredible, really, until she moves up past the ankle to the swell of his calf. 

“Is this okay?”

Max has to grab the headboard and close his eyes at the pain, as she takes his foot by the toes and pushes delicately upwards, forcing the leg to flex. Because she asked him the question, he nods, even though he’d rather she touch him about any other way. It’s an old exercise, one he did used to do with the physiotherapist, though he doesn’t remember it ever hurting this badly back then.

She lets up when she earns a single, involuntary choke out of him, a rusty clicking in his throat, as good as a scream from anyone else. He has a cold sweat on his skin, and when she reaches for him, he reaches back terribly fast.

He knows he should be more diligent about the exercises, but they make it harder to sort out the line between the then and the since. The pain, that _kind_ of pain, was such a feature in his life at the very worst of it. Physio is a reminder, just as sure as guns are, just as sure as the too-close roar of engines bearing down. Any other week it would have been easier, but it’s been getting bad, lately. He can feel himself roaring towards some kind of a precipe, faster than he likes.

Furiosa slips into his lap and wraps her legs around him, holding his head carefully to her chest, so he can hear that her heart is hammering too.

That’s taken all of him that he has, so they sit like that until his head nods into her a little more loosely, a little more tired, and then fall back together into the sheets, for an extra hour of rest, laying front to front, with one of her legs thrown over his hips and his arm tucked tight about her waist.

\---

He takes her later that morning, when they’ve lost the last of the early dawn light that he’s come to associate with her. After facing the early morning down that he feels- good, weirdly. Today is a day where he knows his own strength, and where he especially wants to show it to her, so he fights her when she kisses him, until measure by measure he feels her give.

He takes her on her front, legs spread to either side of his, with an arch in her back that he wants to remember for the rest of his life, and her head pillowed in the crook her arm.

Up the side of one of her thighs she has the healing remains of an encounter with the road, the kind of rough brown scar that means that her bike bit the dirt, that she was dragged, and long enough that her jeans ripped away and let the dirt and jagged gravel up into her skin. He thinks he can see more patches of road rash, but older, better healed, less rough under the palms of his hands. So much of her is hard-bitten, but her body lifts up under his touch, and her voice when she moans is very, very soft.

Max takes her with long, slow thrusts of his hips. It’s purely decadent, how long they take together, before the little spasms rippling through her snap his patience and he leans in and just fucks her, for all he’s worth.

Furiosa groans her approval and he feels her toes curl, up against his calf. 

Later, he finds a bite mark on the muscle of his forearm. Actually, Nux is the one who finds it- points it out with a delicate cough and a deep flush. It’s a good thing they’re well into fall, edging up on what passes for winter in this part of the world. It’s warm during the days, but he can wear a shirt with long sleeves in the evenings.

\---

He does as she says, and walks out into the scrub. He isn’t stupid enough to go far; he knows by the way the locals look at him that he is a city kid, is still helpless in their world in a very real way, that going more than a few feet out here will get him lost or bitten or dehydrated or something. Give him in this country's highways and he can go for miles, but he is not meant to go off-road.

Max does, however, have a very real affinity for silence, for solitude, and out here he can taste it. She’s right. This is an untrodden path.

If he ever needed to get away with something, do something untoward and unseen, he bookmarks this place in his mind as a spot for a crime. The wind and the dust shift so quickly, any evidence would be gone within hours.

\---

Capable’s belly grows bigger every day, and Max finally learns that Splendid was pregnant, because they all go and dig out her things from Ms Brown’s basement for strollers and bassinets and changing tables. Nux and Capable earn a living wage between them, but not exactly a comfortable one, and so every little bit helps.

It wasn’t an intentional pregnancy, from what he can tell, but it seems to now be a desired child, and even though they’re young he thinks they’ll do just fine. There’s a lot of love between them. He and Jessie weren’t much older when they had--

They’ll be fine. Nux reads every book he can find on the subject, chewing his lips to pieces, and Max remembers _that_ feeling. Sympathizes.

“You going to marry the girl?” He asks, during the half hour where their shifts overlap, as he takes his apron off, getting ready to head out the door.

Nux looks up at him in shock, like the idea hadn’t even occurred to him, but yes, yes, of _course,_ he has to ask her to marry him, he almost certainly has to ask tonight, and does Max think they can get a ring in the town of Citadel?

Max doesn’t think you can get _anything_ in the town of Citadel, but that if Nux would like Max can take his shift for him tomorrow so they can head into town and pick out something properly. No charge, no problem, a thank you of a sorts.

He was technically around that age when he asked Jessie to marry him, but somehow can’t believe he was ever that young.

\---

Maybe, he thinks, it wouldn’t be this bad, if it weren’t for it all coming sort of at once. Furiosa could have been killed, and Nux and Capable just stir such vivid memories- the things that were escapes just grind at him now like salt in a wound.

“It’s a bad week.” He tries to tell her, but can’t tell by her face if she hears him or _hears_ him. She seems to, she usually does, but for the first time today her inscrutability works against him. Does she know what he is saying?

He’s reading this book right now. It isn’t very good. But one of the things he likes about it is that it involves two people, one human and one alien, each quite odd to each other. They use a universal translator, but over the course of the book it malfunctions, breaks down periodically, leaves them in synthesis one moment and staring at each other from across a great gulf. It’s a little like that.

“I know it is.” She answers, looking over at him, squinting, measuring, and he feels an equal measure of relief, lowering the book away from his face so she can see his expression better.

She watches him a long time, newspaper lowered into her lap, and reaches out to touch her foot to his.

“After we have the appointment with the sexual health clinic, I think we should get you to the optometrist.”

Crazy, he thinks, and snorts, but puts his nose back into his book, hiding a smile. Pictures her pointing out he should probably go to the dentist, too, then lowers his book again, peering at her and wondering if that’s a charge he should be making in reverse. She hates hospitals, does she hate dental exams as much as he does? Probably.

“Oh no, there’ve been a few mynah bird sightings in town.”

Small town life is such an odd thing. He has another distinct confused moment, but rather than feeling like he can’t understand her or make himself understood, it’s more the sense of a joke being made that he does not understand.

Furiosa steals his newspaper in the shop, because his is from a city, and hers is the journal for the local towns, that always has more on invasive species than it does on home invasions and rising crime rates in major urban areas. He’d thought it was a kind of pig headedness- and it almost _certainly_ is- but to another extent she’s also so much better plugged into this place than he is, and maybe this is part of why.

“Explain?” Max murmurs, setting his book back down on his chest, folded open. Alien attacks and deep space and resistance to a mind-controlling totalitarian regime are all a little grim for him right now.

Instead, she reads out loud, a whole article about the history of the Indian mynah bird, then from memory gives him everything Ms Brown has told her about artichoke thistles and bamboo.

“Did you know someone was on a shooting spree in Perth yesterday?” Mentally correcting himself, he amends; “Day before yesterday. Two casualties, one deceased, one hospitalized, gunman also in critical condition.”

“Ugh. That’s horrible,” says Furiosa, back in her local paper, which of course hasn’t carried a word of the story. She says it in a sort of abstract way, as though no, she hadn't heard and wouldn't have expected to, as though the violence out there is a million miles away.

Furiosa, it strikes him, is not _afraid_ of crime, not in the abstract and all consuming way that he remembers other people being. She is wary, deeply wary, about specific kinds of violence, that is true. But a shooter in Perth doesn’t touch her here, and she isn’t full of the ambiguous anxiety that so many people living in the city have. She is so incredibly, totally secure.

“Read me another article,” Max says, eyes closing, and Furiosa flips a page and starts telling him about the contenders in the election for the next town council. The major issue in the election is going to be whether or not to pave over a stretch of gravel road that he estimates is about seven kilometers long, at the most. What will that kind of radical infrastructure update mean for the town’s taxes, in the future?

‘Quaint’ feels like a petty, mean kind of word, when what he really means is ‘safe.’

\---

When it goes badly, they are in his kitchen. Max is cleaning up the lunch dishes, Furiosa is at the table, reading him the newspaper, when he hears Dag laughing across the street. Out his kitchen window, Max has a perfect view of Ms Brown’s house across the road, so sees Dag heading towards him, knows instantly that she is coming over to speak to them. She’s in her white sundress again, already stained with grass and a little dirt, and bare feet. She catches his eye through the window, and decides she’s going to come over. It happens fast.

She isn’t looking. She runs into the road.

The car stops with five feet to spare, with what is just a tap on the brakes, he will reason later out later. For now, though, all he sees is the surprised look on her face as she turns, realizing too late that thousands of pounds of metal and death are bearing down on her.

 _All_ there is in the world are those lights, and her, and that car, and Max becomes aware for something like a split second that he cannot feel his hands. He knows he is holding a plate. No, he can feel them, maybe, but in a sort of abstract way, from his chest down, while the rest of him hangs in the air, suspended outside of himself. Both parts of him are true, but in different worlds entirely. He is severed quite in two, an iron bar or empty air clean between his head and his shoulders.

Someone, very distantly, says his name, and then someone (what, ‘someone?’ he knows who it is) yells it, _Max_ as a car from all those years ago screams in and the flashback just swallows him whole.

He feels himself black right out, and as he goes down he knows he is going to hit the ground bad, and hard.


	4. an officer and a gentleman

At first when Max dropped, Furiosa had thought it was a health issue, maybe a heart attack or some kind of freak stroke. She’d jammed her fingers in his wrist and tested his pulse, and he’d clearly been breathing- and he’d woken right up again after just a second or two.

Max is pale with terror, pupils blown, hands cold, chest sawing in as textbook a case of a panic attack as she’s ever seen. A few of her residents have had them before, so she knows what she’s looking for, but somehow the fact that it’s him makes every single strategy for how to cope with them fly right out of her head. It’s different when it’s a tenant. This is _Max_

When he reaches for her, she grabs his hands back when he clasps hers, shifts forward, presses his forehead to his, and tells him that he is fine, she has him, that everything will be all right.

“It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m here. You’re okay, okay-”

It’s the sight of Dag, skittering in through the kitchen door at a run, that seems to finally bring him back down to earth enough to let himself be helped into bed.

Furiosa kicks Dag back out, which is maybe a bad idea objectively but in the moment feels like the only thing she can do because he’s private, he’s _so_ incredibly private, and goes to search his bathroom for pill bottles, desperately hoping against hope for a script for ativan or something like it. Of course, the only bottles she finds are labelled paroxetine, which she doesn’t know a thing about. Besides, the prescription is dated almost seven years old. Given that he just moved in here six months ago, she has no idea why he’s still carrying it, since he clearly isn’t taking it- like everything else going on today it raises more questions than it answers.

She bolts back to his side with a snarl.

Max reaches for her when she returns, crushing her hands in his, looking up at her with a vision that seems to swim. 

“She’s okay,” is all she can think to say, “she’s okay. Would it help if you saw her? She can come in here.”

When he doesn’t answer, Furiosa goes quiet, just holding onto him.

\---

Is this how Max felt, when she came back from the garage and curled up in his bed? Because it’s agony. He falls into an uneasy sleep around dusk, while she strokes her hand through his short hair and lets his head rest on her thigh, his hand curled tight around his knee. He looks exhausted, burnt to the quick, and mortified- he tries hard to meet her eyes and can’t seem to, as though she has seen a part of him that he is not proud of.

Furiosa has no idea how to reassure him without being patronizing. It looks like it feels awful, like he has wrecked up on the afternoon like a car flipping over a median, like a crumpled up wreck of buckled, twisted metal. 

How was it he held her through all that and never, for one single second, made her feel weak?

She remembers that his hands were strong, and steady. She remembers infinite patience. She remembers no hesitation from him.

Furiosa reaches down and puts a hand around the nape of his neck, giving him a strong squeeze there like she might if they were wrapped up together under better circumstances, and she wanted to convey her approval.

Max lets out the faintest, faintest of sighs, and tucks himself closer to her in the bed.

She settles herself gradually down, and leans back against the pillows a little more fully. She can sleep sitting up, no problem. He can stay just like this, for now, and they can come to the rest of it in the morning.

\---

“Morning,” she hears him mumble, just around dawn. She isn’t quite awake herself, not until she recalls why she feels so headachey and strange, why she’s sitting up against the headboard.

“Morning,” she answers, gently, reaching down and carding a hand through his hair, deciding, “let me up, I’m going to go make us breakfast.”

The cooking, he normally handles, since he does it with considerable more skill and aplomb than her- and more _interest,_ honestly, she has a bad habit of walking away from the stove midway through and blackening the bottoms of her pots.

Still, he must be able to tell what she’s driving at, the urge to tend, to provide, because he rolls off her to let her up and stays there quietly in bed.

He looks defeated. Furiosa remembers what she’d thought, last night, about not wanting to feel condescended to, and clears her throat as she gets to her feet. Announces, perfectly airily, as she saunters out of the room;

“I’m putting on some coffee.”

“No you are _not._ ” Max says, sitting up in bed in a hurry and clearly only barely restraining himself from tripping right out after her.

\---

She knows they have to talk. He knows they have to talk. An event like that is past the point where they can afford to be taciturn about it. It's all well and good to joke around in the morning, and she does try to treat him normally, but there are things that cannot be left unsaid.

Furiosa waits him out, all the next day. They have it off, together, so she takes him walking in the scrub back behind her property. She brings a blanket, a couple of bottles of water, a couple of sandwiches.

“Happens a few times a year. Usually a few in a go, and then nothing.” He says, as they pick their way down the back of a small bluff.

“Stress’ll be a pretty good recipe for a flare up. Or something that’s a reminder.” This, a few hundred or more steps later, as they get out to where the dirt turns more to sand.

“There was a diagnosis.” Shiftily, as they finish unfolding the picnic blanket between them. She has still said barely a word, as though this is one long sentence of his, that simply happens to have spanned the length of an hour. She knows not to interrupt. This time, it’s only a bare ten minutes before he says it out loud. “PTSD. Attendant depression. Maybe anxiety. It’s a mess.”

There’s more than a little dissociation in that last bit, but she doesn’t feel the need to comment on whether _it_ is a mess or _he_ is a mess. Furiosa cracks the top off his water bottle, and hands it over to him. He takes a long sip, lets out a breath of relief, and extends the bad leg to try to ease some of the pain in his knee.

Furiosa hands him a sandwich, and when he hesitates, tells him, with a shrug.

“I want you to be happy and healthy. You’re going to do what you need to do, and I hope you let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Max takes the egg salad from her, cautiously, and apparently tries to decide how he feels about knowing this, how he feels about her saying things like this to him.

He chews, swallows, and turns back out to look at the wilderness, and Furiosa thinks to herself, they can do this. It’ll be okay.

\---

Dag, unlike Furiosa, is of the school of belief that involves sucking it up and pretending it never happened. Max explains to Furiosa later that he has never heard a word about how her arm was broken. Dag does not expect him to tell her a thing about how he came to black out in his kitchen.

She just looks him over head to toe next time she sees him, gives him an especially aggressive glare, and then nods him into the garden ahead of her, because it’s cauliflower today.

\---

To make matters fucking worse, there is a car following her.

Furiosa notices it on the way back from a grocery run. It’s impossible to tail someone discreetly in the country around Citadel. The ground is too wide, too flat, too sprawling by far for anything like subtlety. There is a grey Ford on her tail, the one from outside her garage, from before and it is following her. She checks the dash compartment for her gun, just in case, before she spots the low slung ring of the light bar around the top of the windshield, the steelies it’s riding on, the extra antenna cluster, and most of all the way he handles the tail job.

There is a cop following her, in an unmarked car. This isn’t significantly less complicated, but at least means she can’t come out shooting.

Heart in her throat, Furiosa drives all the way home. She checks him out in the rearview, and is surprised that he is young. Musclebound, bald, a real ugly son of a bitch. He’s right on her, now, even tailgating her a little, and she knows that this guy is trying to rattle her. 

Furiosa is not a woman who rattles.

Pulling into her driveway, she hops out and pops the trunk, picks up the bag full of groceries as though she doesn’t have a care in the world, as though this prick isn’t pulling his car up behind hers, trapping her in. She slams the trunk lid down with a little more relish than is needed, heaves the grocery bag onto one hip, and walks up to his window, which he rolls down, obligingly.

His big forearm leans over the edge of the window, and he looks up at her. His eyes remind her of Joe’s. She thinks he seems like the kind of guy who chews on the ends of cigars.

“I’m going to need to see a badge, officer.”

If she startles him by identifying him before he does it himself, he does a fairly good job of not showing it. She thinks she catches a look in his eye that suggests disappointment, though. This is a man who wants her to be afraid of him.

“Detective,” he corrects her, flipping his badge open and showing it to her. She leans in and commits the number to memory, lets him see her doing it, counting under her breath. 

“Appreciate it.”

Furiosa turns, and starts to walk up towards the house, and is gratified to hear the sound of a car door being hurriedly opened behind her, to hear him following her up the steps.

He’s a big guy, yeah, has almost a half a foot of height on her. It’s intimidating, even though she tries not to let it be. She turns back to him, and squares herself off to face him, because to be perfectly honest she doesn’t want to let him in her house. Besides, what could he really have to talk to her about?

“Miss Imperatore, I’m here to follow up on a call you made about a robbery, a month or so back. Can I come in so we can talk?”

Shit.

\---

Detective Rictus sits at her kitchen table, and watches her put away groceries. Furiosa refuses to let herself waver. She crouches in front of the fridge, shelving meat into one of the drawers.

“You had some questions about the assault?”

Furiosa prompts him, matter of factly, as she stores the milk on the upper shelf, puts the cheese and butter away.

“No.” He says, and looks at her, waiting for her to ask. A half a year in Max’s company, and this pause is child’s play to her. He cracks first. “I had some questions about the _call._ You phoned it in at around what time?”

“I didn’t phone it in.” She says, straightening up, shutting the fridge behind her, and folding her arms up over her chest. This feels disloyal, to even admit this much, but she knows that somewhere there is a tape, and she does not want him to trap her in a falsehood right off the bat. “Max did.”

Offer nothing, give up nothing. Being a pill with police officers is pure reflex to her, especially when they're asking about friends and family.

“Yes, that’s right. Max Rockatansky.”

She affirms this with her silence. Rictus, the asshole, flips open the first page of his notepad, and writes something down.

“And Constable Rockatansky identified himself, on this call, as your boyfriend. To the best of your knowledge is that information correct?”

“Well,” says Furiosa, “I couldn’t possibly say.”

His brows draw in together in confusion. She amends;

“I wasn’t in the room when the phonecall was made, so I don’t know how he identified himself.”

Rictus leans forward in his seat, and asks;

“But you would characterize yourselves as being romantically involved.”

Furiosa shrugs, again, noncommittal. 

“I wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth.”

Pushed up to the edge of his very short patience, a little red-faced, Rictus forgoes finesse.

“Let me put this a little more simply. Are you fucking?”

“Oh,” says Furiosa, all _why didn’t you just say so_ and innocent, “absolutely.”

\---

He doesn’t ask her much more than that. He just tells her he’ll be in touch, closes his little notebook, and goes out to get into his car.

The first thing she wants to do is give Max a call and warn him that trouble is on its’ way, but she knows that there’s a good chance this guy will be able to get at Max’s phone records, and if something comes of this it’s best that no such record exists, because much could be made of a tip off like that in court.

For the same reason, she stays put, does not leave right away to walk to the shop, to go and find him. She just rubs her hand through her hair, swears a little, and goes to her place to pace and stress and be too worried to cook herself dinner. 

It’s the timing of it. The fact that Max is two days out after a flashback so intense it literally took the feet out from right under him, plus dealing with the not inconsiderable stress associated with having had to be open about it with her, makes her want to keep him safe from this in the worst of ways. He has enough going on right now, can’t this Detective just leave it? 

It never rains but it pours. She’ll just have to see him in the morning.

\---

To her shock, Detective Rictus apparently gets out of town after his little sit-down with her rather than doing what she’d anticipated and driving right over to Max’s place, because when she gets to the shop the next morning, Max has no idea. She arrives for ten minutes before opening, just in case, so when he gets there she can take him by the hand and drag him a half a block down, just in case the guy is a step ahead of her and has planted something in the shop. Legal or illegal, recording devices these days are too small to be spotted readily.

“A police officer stopped by last night asking about you.” She tells him, and watches the confusion in his expression slip away, be gradually replaced by a reluctant understanding and by pure ice.

“What did he…?”

“Want? Nothing, except to try to get me on edge. He tailgated me home in an unmarked car, did the whole ‘how do you know Mr Rockatansky?’ business. He asked if we were fucking.”

Max nods, thoughtfully, and she waits, watching him run possibilities through his mind, watches the reluctant conclusion he finally comes to.

“Do you remember specifically whether he called me ‘Mister?’”

She doesn’t, not right away- and then she does, but she doesn’t understand why it would matter. Is it a question of respect? She narrows her eyes, tilts her head at him, and sees it- it’s a matter of the timeline.

“Constable. Constable Rockatansky. His name was Detective Eric Rictus, he was a big, beefy guy- I’ve got his badge number written down back home.”

He shakes his head, mildly, not at the number. It isn’t someone he recognizes, then, but he doesn’t exactly look baffled, either. Just resigned.

Carefully, reservedly, she asks the question she’s been dreading;

“You don’t have to clear out of town or anything, do you?”

Max looks over at her in surprise, and his expression softens. He gives a tiny shake of his head, and she sees it in his face. _Not an option._

“Okay. But if at any point, you want me to sweep you out of here on my bike, I’m _owed_ a vacation, and the girls keep telling me that we’re at the point in our relationship where a couples’ road trip would be great.”

But _seriously,_ she says, with the brush of her fingertips over his knuckles. Seriously, she would pack him up and drive him out of here, if it got too hot for him.

“It’d make it worse.” Max demurs, but his thumb touches hers in return, and she can see that his expression is soft, that he knows that she means it.

“Listen,” she says, “It’s pretty clear he wants something on you that he thinks he’s going to get from me, and right now I don’t know anything, except that you were a police officer. I think it’s best for everyone if we keep it that way.”

She sees the look of relief wreathing his expression, right before he kisses her. 

He is worried. She can see that he is worried. There is a better than good chance that Rictus is screwing with her in order to get to him, because Rictus is the kind of chauvinist that assumes that Furiosa is going to be a weak spot, is a good place to put pressure, is likely to give.

Furiosa has never wanted to prove anyone more wrong in her life.

\---

The first thing she should have done, yesterday, that she missed out on because she was so busy worrying about Max, was to call Valkyrie.

Police business like this impacts all the women. Furiosa isn’t taking new tenants right now, and won’t be for a while, thanks to Joe’s stunt, but on the off chance that this does turn into something that is a bigger deal, then it’s going to be important that the gang not get involved. There are enough quasi-legal activities going on there that they don’t want to invite scrutiny.

Furiosa places a call, leaves a message. Val will have to call her back.

When she gets off the line, and it rings right thereafter, she thinks maybe this is it, the returned call, that Valkyrie just couldn’t get off her line in time, so she is twice as startled as normal to pick up the phone and find that her other caller is Max.

He doesn’t call her often, because the pair of them on the phone are ridiculous- but for whatever reason he calls her tonight.

“The girls want us to take a car trip.”

Max’s questions often come disguised as nonsequitors.

“Mm.” Furiosa agrees, phone cradled between her ear and her shoulder, as she carries the receiver into the bathroom. Turns off the water for the tub, and slips in.

He waits until he hears her settle, before humming, pressing her for more on the subject.

“A car trip. In yours, in mine, we can flip a coin. Take turns driving. Go until we come to the end in the road. Sleep in the passenger seat and primarily shower and fuck in cheap motels. Pack light, run hot, eat lunch on a blanket out in the dirt. Scare the tourists, shock the locals, see the sights.”

“I like it already.” But there’s a little bit of curiosity there, still, as well as tender anticipation. There is still something he wants to know that she hasn’t told him.

Oh-

“If you’re asking whether or not there is a panel of four young women who offer me constant unsolicited advice on dating you--”

Max just groans, and she hears his breath thud, like he’s falling onto his back into bed. That’s the nail on the head then.

“--then I would say no. Our dating is monitored by a panel of three. Toast does not offer relationship advice so much as exclusively sex advice, so she probably doesn’t count.”

They’ve been together long enough that Furiosa hears the texture of his silence change into a strangled exasperation.

“Does the fact that she has recently come out of the closet as a complete lesbian deter her, you ask? Far from it. In fact, she is now even more willing to salaciously hold forth on what exactly it is I should get you to do to me. She has been trying to get me to casually mention to you that she is _available for tips_ if you need.”

There is an appropriately scandalized pause, and then Max snorts and _hangs up on her._ Furiosa laughs so hard she nearly goes under the water.

(It was very sweet of him to call to wish her goodnight.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO I KNOW Rictus Erectus is firstname Rictus, but I kept typing Detective Erectus and just laughing so hard I had make a judgement call and tweak this in the hopes of giving him a shot at actually being sinister. My Rictus is a bit brighter than the version in the movie, because I'm choosing to interpret a lot of what was going on with him as environmental- so in this he will be mean and a little dumb but at a functioning level.
> 
> Other note; Babe Dubeau and Ms Brown are the other two characters who have name changes. Ms Brown is the Keeper of the Seeds. ~~Babe is much less obvious, but in my head he is Furiosa's sidekick from the beginning, the one who calls her boss and who she decks and sends out a window. I realized just this afternoon that I think the character's name may actually have been Grue or something like it, but I missed that entirely before the chapter was up. If I can find confirmation on it I may go back and edit, but for the time being... that is who that is.~~ Debbie, she of the corner store that sells sandwiches and milk- who is not much of anyone yet, is loosely patterned on the milk mothers, for interest's sake, if anyone wants to picture her in their minds eye.
> 
> ETA: tremendous thanks to wPhantom who solved my mystery for me. Babe has now been correctly identified as 'Ace.' For those following along as I'm posting, the previous chapter has now been edited!


	5. ginger chew

There are still good days and there are still bad days.

Strangely enough, after the appearance of the detective in their lives, Max feels his equilibrium take a shift towards the balanced. 

It has something to do, he knows, with saying the words out loud to her, even just so few of them. _You need to find someone you can talk to, Max,_ has been a refrain sung at him again and again for years. Until her, he had never known anyone with whom the idea had seemed to have any merit.

It also has something to do with having something to prepare for. If this detective is in town and asking questions, it can only mean that interest in the case has opened back up. He has worked enough cold cases in his time to know that this periodically does happen. You find a box, you find a theory that fits, you take a few days and you go have a look. It’s the product of a little bit of curiosity, a little bit of a lust for overtime, maybe a desire to get on the road- it’s bad, but it isn’t bad enough to consider anything drastic. In fact, the calmer he remains, the better it will be in the long run.

Innocent men don’t panic, innocent men don’t flee, and Max is not going to let Detective Rictus (morbid name, weirdly- maybe Dutch, or German?) spook him, just by getting Furiosa involved.

Though he worries, the thought of it fills him with a sort of savage joy. Seeing her be underestimated is like the rushed intake of breath that comes _before._ Before what, he doesn’t know, but knowing her he anticipates that it will be glorious.

If Rictus had anything real, anything even close enough to officially open the case back up, he wouldn’t have gone after her. He sounds heavy handed, and while Max is wary, it’s the way he’s wary of men with bulldozers. He does not worry that Rictus cannot be outmaneuvered or outrun.

It will later prove to be a ghastly bit of hubris, this line of thought, a total underestimation of the sheer, pigheaded, destructive power of a man fuelled by hatred, but for right now what Max knows is that he is feeling good.

\---

The truth is, Max doesn’t like it. It still feels too good to be true, that Furiosa is alive and unscathed. Since her recovery from the attack has moved on, since she’s left his house, his clothes, his bed, he catches himself sleeping tucked to one side of the bed, rather than sprawled in the centre. He reaches across to her side reflexively in the mornings, and sometimes feels a shiver of panic when he finds her absent, even though they do sleep apart more often than not. When the dreams are especially bad, he cannot shake the feeling of fear until he sees her in the shop, for her coffee. Because he knows that this is a _symptom_ rather than a reality, he controls himself carefully, allows himself no real accommodation, relies on willpower to get through those mornings without rushing. 

It’s the same feeling he remembers as a kid, turning off the basement lightswitch at the bottom of the stairs, and taking carefully measured steps up into the light of the doorway above. With the deep black of the room below him, the temptation to run up the steps had been almost impossible to resist. He’d nearly always begun steady, but given in and vaulted up the last three, tension unbearable in those last few seconds. It took him until he was almost ten to be able to take even, measured paces all the way up.

Waiting to see her on the bad mornings is just like that.

\---

Life goes on.

The handcuffs are the sort of thing that wouldn’t have happened except as a culmination as a set of very specific, coincidental circumstances. Or else, it was always going to happen, could never not have happened, Max isn’t sure which.

The first thing is that shotgun Furiosa keeps under her desk, has kept there, since the day she missed Immortan Joe’s phonecall. Max is out in the yard, changing a tire on the great black beast, when she comes out to stand behind him.

She’s in a mood, as she often is after handling guns, so she greets him with a hand on the nape of his neck, the careful, just shy of painful drag of her thumb down to a place just above his shoulderblade that always gives him trouble. She pushes.

Max grunts, and braces himself up on the car, head tipping forwards. Thinks, weirdly enough, in this exact moment, that he’s probably falling in love with her. The knot in his muscle screams under the sharp, sharp pressure and she holds him like that until he gasps, until it starts to give.

Furiosa eases off, gives his ear a kiss, and offers;

“I’ve got my cleaning supplies out in there. Do you want me to give yours a once over?”

“Sure,” Max agrees, when he has his footing back. There are few people in the world he trusts to take apart, to even handle his weaponry, and she is one of them. “Both of them could use it. The dust out here is murder.”

Furiosa is digging around in the glove compartment for the gun, when instead she finds his handcuffs.

Max freezes, when he sees what she’s holding, and relaxes when he sees the slow, assessing look on her face. She’s considering something.

He’s been around the block a time or two. He knows what she’s got on her mind.

“We’ll talk about it,” he forestalls, because they won’t talk about it _here,_ or until she’s had a little time to think the idea through away from all this gunmetal and, to be perfectly honest, away from him.

“I’m not going to stop thinking about it.” Furiosa promises, and heads back for the office with his weapons, and the sway to her she gets when there’s something on her mind. When she just needs to gather the words to persuade him to see it her way, when she knows he won’t regret it.

He grins, and anticipates that his wrists will be cuffed around a bedpost by the end of the week.

Max Rockatansky isn’t wrong about _everything,_ it turns out.

\---

It was the 000 call, he decides. That’s why Rictus showed up. Max had identified himself to both the dispatcher, and to the officers on the scene. If the police had lost track of him, it would have certainly have happened some time after he quit his work on the rig, during the months, the years, he was on the road. 

There’s a chance it may also have been the car. With the black beast broken down for so long, and barely limping along for about the year before that, he hadn’t bothered to renew his registration or insurance paperwork until just recently, so if anyone had been looking for him in the interim, his latest address would have shown up re-filed just a few weeks back. But even if it hadn’t been for the call or the car, pretty soon Nux is going to put in the papers for the year’s taxes at the Open Road, and he’s going to show back up as having an income.

Still, it was most likely the police call. It’d be the most direct way for his name to show up in an active system. Everything else would have to be a specific search, and the turnaround time just doesn’t line up. This Rictus guy was keeping an eye out for him, and when his name popped up at that dispatch centre, something had been kicked into motion.

He downloads software, files, and pays nearly four years of backtaxes that afternoon, just in case. This is mostly superstition, but with a hard bite of common sense, right at the middle; when you’re trying to avoid prosecution, it does not pay to be sloppy about your taxes.

\---

“Listen.” Dag snaps at him, that afternoon in the garden. “We know things. Like chewing gum.”

It’s a bit out of nowhere, even for her. He hums, and shoves a trowel in, getting a weed out by the taproot.

“The girls and I, I mean. I haven’t said a thing, because it’s your business to tell, but you’ll want to talk to Cheedo. And Cheedo will want to talk to you. Cheedo keeps gum on her, because if you start chewing during a panic attack, it can make your brain think everything is okay, cause you’re eating, right?”

Now Max looks up, and sees Dag, a mutinous vision, holding her hoe in one hand, the other curled into a fist, braced on her hip. Her shoulders are so much stronger than they were at the start of the summer.

“Cheedo knows a lot about panic attacks.”

Max looks up, weed in hand, while Dag slams the hoe back into the earth. She looks angry. She has looked angry since the moment she got here, he recalls, but now she looks angry with herself, for knowing these things, for needing to know these things.

“For me, you’ve got to curl your toes.”

Slam. Dirt skitters a little, as she keeps going with unnecessary relish. Max could still do the work in about a quarter of the time it’ll take Dag to use the heavy implement, but the point isn’t the speed. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, and meet her eyes when she looks over at him.

“Do you ever get the thing where it feels like you can’t feel anything from the neck down?”

Max nods, very tentatively, and Dag, who works in birkenstocks, shows him a pale foot, covered in dry red dirt.

“I feel like a fucking moron when I’m doing it, but if you like. Engage the muscles in your feet.” Showing him a slow roll, from her toe to the base of her heel. “I sometimes kick my shoes off and do it in the dirt, just so I have the heat and the texture. It puts your body back together. Knocks it off before it begins.” A level, hostile stare. “Even Furiosa doesn’t know that. Get me?”

It is costing her so visibly to tell him this that Max chokes a little on his reply. Dag reads it, and his approval, and nods, looking back at the house, fast, mutinous.

“If you want to talk to anyone who knows the rest of it.”

Max goes back to pulling weeds, and thinks about sand between his toes.

\---

They don’t talk about the handcuffs yet. It isn’t the kind of thing you rush. They talk a little more about Rictus, instead, and about the call she made last night. Instead, quietly, cautiously, Max asks her;

“Can you tell me a little about the Valkyrie?”

Furiosa honestly can’t, not that much, but he likes the way her face lights up when she thinks of her. On the day to day, in a town like this, Furiosa is a lynx padding quietly among housecats. He imagines her out there, with them, in another kind of element.

“Valkyrie took over a couple of years back. At first, they had this kind of group-decided, non-hierarchical consensus philosophy, but it was like a lot of things back then- pretty on paper but total nonsense in real life.”

Max snakes an arm around her waist, and listens.

“But what’s great about Val is that she’s started making these steps towards _changing_ some of the things that I could just never be proud of. Club membership is open to anyone who has experienced misogyny. Shelter resources are there for anyone who experiences oppression through violence. For a long, long time, the trans and genderqueer kids were left out of this kind of feminism, and that was a fucking travesty.”

Max doesn’t need to be told why. Back when he was a cop there actually hadn’t been much violence against trans people reported. The police themselves were still far too much of an untrustworthy entity. Max remembers their old GLLO very well (gay and lesbian liaison officer, he thinks it stood for, though it has firmly merged into just the acronym in his head, in the way he has to slow down and think about what RSVP actually refers to.) The man had been working out of his precinct since somewhere around ‘99, but the tide of who reported crime wasn’t so quick to turn based on one community liaison program, not after years of harassment. But he knows, knows the shadow estimates for who experiences the most violence, inter-partner or otherwise. 

He remembers the first time he’d been called on scene to a bashing. He shivers, and curls closer to her, half to get further into the safety of her lap, half to bring his body up around her in a close, protective furl.

“We always have to be careful with the youth set, because we’re risking charges of kidnapping, but still a huge chunk of our spaces in real cities go to street involved kids who might not be safe in just any shelter, or might even be turned away from some. I never get them out here, but only because Citadel is so small. The people aren’t actually that rednecked, when you get to know them, but you never know who’s driving through town. Most of all, though, the overwhelming feedback from when we tried was that the place just doesn’t feel safe enough, and more than anything that’s what this is about, so.”

He feels, rather than sees, the reluctance in her shrug.

“The group philosophy- it’s just first steps, overcoming a lot of ingrained bullshit, but it’s down to Val that they’re this far along. And it’s why I’m comfortable working for them, even though they can be a little much sometimes. Even though there are things they have done and said that I’m sometimes ashamed of.”

There is such personal familiarity in her tone here that he thinks about what he knows, about her leaving for Canada at fourteen, and finding a father she couldn’t stand, moving out to be on her own not long thereafter.

Her expression is already clouded, and she has fallen the kind of silent that is more sorrowful than natural, so he takes her hand in his, touching each one of her fingertips slowly to his lips.

“Valkyrie is like that. Valkyrie had the guts to stand up to people she admired, cherished, respected, and said ‘what you’re doing is wrong, follow me and together we’ll help to change it.’”

There is a keen kind of respect and affection in her voice, and Max hopes that when she tells other people about him, she sounds even halfway so proud.

\---

He can’t get anything about Rictus out of the town gossip mill. This is because Max isn’t nearly engaged enough in it to merit the juiciest bits of details, or maybe because Rictus just hasn’t been around long enough.

Debbie’s brother was driving past the Old Stone Motel and saw the Ford parked there, but that’s the extent of it. No one else can guess who he is, or why he’s here. 

The most popular theory floating around is Susan Greer’s- she thinks that he must finally be doing something about the attempted daylight robbery over at the garage. Debbie floats this to him hungrily, looking for confirmation in his face, because the detective _was_ talking to Miss Furiosa the other day, wasn’t he?

Max pays for one of her sandwiches, picks up his copy of the city paper, and throws the change in the take-a-penny.

\---

They also finally, eventually, talk about the handcuffs. Sober second thought has made her careful, it seems, almost to the same degree that it has made him incautious. He wants from her. She wants to know;

“What do you call it, what happened in the kitchen the other day?”

A bad memory.

“If you’re having a bad memory, do you think you’d be able to let me know?”

He should think it would be obvious.

“But in case it isn’t.”

No. Yes. It depends how bad.

“Do you think there’s anything we might do that would bring up a memory like that in bed?”

 _Christ,_ no.

(He doesn’t mean to snap, but even saying this much, a part of him is outside of himself, hearing them sitting in his kitchen discussing trauma. He can hear her _training,_ crisis intervention volunteer work, if he had to guess.)

Slow, slowly, he surfaces out of his strange feeling of defensive distance, and says, carefully;

“Sorry.”

Furiosa nods. She doesn’t look remotely angry with him, which he can appreciate, because he can hear himself being a bit of a fucking pill, honestly. She looks more contemplative, than anything.

“Is it part of the thing we aren’t talking about?”

Rictus, she means.

“Yeah.” And. “But really, in bed- nah. With you? I trust you.”

He wonders if she remembers what he’d told Dag once, about the particular order that love and trust come in, some of the times. From her expression, he can’t tell, except that she looks at him with something a lot like tenderness, and reaches out to rub a hand through his hair. He leans helplessly into her touch, and says it again;

“I trust you.”

\---

Furiosa takes him to bed. Handcuffs him to it. Sets the key on the dresser, where they both can see it if they need.

She’s gentler with him than she’s been so far, as though the uncompromising bracelets serve as force enough. He is in agony, when he cannot touch her, reaches for her reflexively again and again, constantly thwarted, until he falters, breath catching. She carefully, patiently, reduces him to keening, to a complete mess.

There is sweat on his skin, in his hair, in his eyes. She kisses his hairline, and moves her hips with such a knowing grace that he can’t breathe.

She waits until he begs. He loves her. Barely manages not to say it.

Max falls all to pieces for her, and she rides him through his tremors, accepting it all.

\---

Max spends twenty minutes the next morning totally lost in thought, tracing the bruises on his wrists, trying to recall the correct and incorrect uses and meanings of the word ‘irony.’

Is it ironic, that the first time in seven years he is ready to talk to someone about what happened, they decide that, on account of a police investigation, he cannot?

Nux interrupts his train of thought, and drags him out of the warm, floating haze that he’s been wrapped in since she wrapped her legs around him and really, truly growled at him. Nux isn’t on shift, but lives upstairs so comes down for the morning now and again to stop in, to bring cups of tea up to Capable to help settle her stomach.

Max thinks of the ginger chews that Jessie used to live off, beg for, all of the first and second trimesters, and his mood is slightly dampened.

“You don’t know how bad it is,” Nux says, helplessly, “she’s really awfully sick, and there isn’t a thing I can do about it. Nothing I can say will help.”

“Say nothing,” Max advises, laconically as he can, as though it’s purely abstract, as though he hasn’t lived it. “You’re not expected to fix it, she just needs you to hear her. Bring her a cup of tea, hold her hair back, hold her hand.”

“She screams at me to get out, says she hasn’t forgotten whose fault this all is.” Nux says, in a tone that is faintly strangled, and Max can’t help grinning.

“That’s a stage some mums go through. She’s kidding. And anyways, it passes.”

“When?” Nux asks, but he is laughing now, helplessly, and still scared but somehow just a little stronger. “After the terrible twos?”

“College age. Bring her tea up, go.”

Nux is figuring it out, he knows, will have this part of him maybe before Furiosa even does. It can’t be helped.

The long sleeved shirt doesn’t do him any good today with the handcuff bruises, but almost no one but a cop would know what that particular bruise on the wristbone means. Though the grey Ford stays parked outside the coffee shop for three hours that morning, Detective Rictus himself does not make an appearance.


	6. adversarial

Furiosa hears the bleat of sirens behind her, and glances at the spedometer. A full seventeen kilometers an hour over the limit isn’t actually that far out of line, for the locals, but she really should have known better. She’d handed this one to him.

She pulls over. Gets out her license, rolls her window down as Detetive Rictus strolls his lazy way up to her car. The satisfaction is radiating off him in smug ways.

“Sorry about that, Officer,” she says, passing the card out, “she’s a smooth ride, looks my foot got a little heavier than I realized.”

He nods, and makes a show of looking over her card. She closes her eyes, listening to the sound of his pen scratching.

“You know, Rockatansky used to be a hell of a driver, too. You must like that about each other, huh?”

She doesn’t dignify this with a response, just takes her card back and the ticket from him, tosses both into the passenger side without bothering to read them.

“We’re done here,” he tells her, stepping back, gesturing for her to go. He stays on her tail, so she drives exactly the speed limit, not a hair over, the whole rest of the way out to meet Cheedo.

\---

Cheedo is well, and still a little guilt ridden (and totally unwilling to say a word about Toast) but eager to catch up on the rest of it, on Capable and Nux, Max and Dag and Ms Brown. Her own news is all lovely; work is going well, she has been asked out a few times but isn’t really dating-

Furiosa is glad to hear that in all the world, there are a few things going right. One thing that she's evidently enjoying is the myriad of small stories you get from being on film-sets. Cheedo now knows which of her narrow pool of stars she's met are personable, and which are mean as can be and take it out on their own PAs. Furiosa doesn't actually hang on to celebrity or actor names particularly well, but spends a good twenty minutes faking it, because she likes the cheery authority in Cheedo's voice. She cares more about how all this relates to _Cheedo_ than how it relates to the names and faces from the gossip rags, but knows that there's more than one way to skin a cat. Her updates filter in, between the juicy bits.

But the conversation circles back around to Detective Rictus, soon enough.

“Are you sure he’s even allowed to _issue_ you traffic tickets, if he’s not a member of our state police force?”

“I have no idea. I’ll ask when I go to pay them. But the point isn’t the tickets, I can afford those.”

“No, I know.” Cheedo agrees, drumming her neat fingernails on the table, considering this carefully.

“I just. It doesn’t sound very by the books. And if you need to go to another police officer for help, in the end, that can only help you, right?”

It’s a good question, and one that Furiosa doesn’t necessarily have an answer for right off the top of her head. The idea of going to the police for help is so antithetical to the way she was raised that it’s completely wishful thinking. 

“I guess it can’t _hurt,_ can it?”

When she leaves the cafe, Rictus is still there, still following her as she makes her by-the-books crawl all the way home.

\--- 

“What took you?” Ms Brown asks, accepting her into a warm embrace as she comes up the steps. Furiosa knows she looks sweaty, hot, frustrated.

“You don’t want to know,” she promises, pulling her into a quick hug, before stepping back, “and more to the point, I can’t get into it, but I don’t think I can be the one to do the grocery runs for a couple of weeks.”

Ms Brown looks her over, shrewdly, and for a second, looks like she might ask. In the end, though, she just nods Furiosa at a chair, and moves to put away the groceries herself.

\---

At her place, later, she tries to get onto the computer to google Detective Rictus, but it's a bad day for the internet, and the logo for the police website takes a few minutes to load. Max, she can tell by his fidgeting, hasn't had to deal with anything like country-bandwidth in years, and doesn't have the patience to stay for the operation. She sure misses having Valkyrie to call on, right about now.

She abandons the search after twenty minutes, which is only enough to take her through the first three results.

\---

They get what feels like the first news they’ve had about Immortan Joe that they’ve had in nearly a year. In reality, it’s only been a couple of months since he died, but so much has happened since then that it feels like the whole world has rolled itself over twice already.

Furiosa tries dimly to imagine what it would have been like for her right now if she’d found him, shot him, killed him. For one thing, she likely would have died herself in the attempt. If not, she would likely be facing charges, or at the very least under investigation for her possible role in the homicide.

This makes her think at once of Max. Max is- that he is- not fragile, fragile does not do him justice, because nothing about him is close to that. No, he’s- like a desert, an ecosystem as crushing and powerful as it is precariously balanced. Change too much, and catastrophe awaits. 

For the first time ever, Furiosa sees that if something goes very badly between them, if she breaks his heart, or if she goes and dies, Max may not actually be _all right_ , the way you’re supposed to be after you pull through a heartbreak. He may have laid something on the line here, without necessarily spelling it out for her.

But then, of course he wouldn’t have. As obvious as the fact that he needs glasses to read is the fact that Max does not want to make Furiosa in any way responsible for his baggage. And what was he supposed to do, anyways, warn her in advance that she was his last hope?

It’s fine, she decides. That’s all there is to it. He is wounded and he is lovely, and he is hers, and they were doing fine before she ever came to this realization. It’s just one of those weeks, where she’s up in her own head. More than that, he’s an adult, and she owes him not to decide what he needs to be protected from. She’d be livid if he tried it, after all, the least she can do is extend him the same courtesy.

They sleep in the same bed more often than not these nights, with the times apart being the exception, rather than the rule. Tonight, to take Valkyrie’s call, she has to slip out from under his arm, pick up the vibrating cell from her dresser, and sit up. He begins to wake, and she leans back over, gives him a reassuring kiss on the corner of his mouth, and instructs him;

“Go back to sleep. I won’t be long.”

He never quite truly does wake all the way up, just shifts onto his stomach and hides his face in the pillow.

She walks downstairs, and dials Valkyrie right back, because by now the ringing has stopped.

“We think we have a lead.” Valkyrie says, right away. “On who carried out the hit. We’re ready to say-”

“Don’t.” Furiosa answers, cutting her off, because she’s realized something important, since she talked to Max last. “I’m not a safe person to talk to about this right now.”

The pause on the other end of the line is monumental. Furiosa has been dying for news since well before the attack at her shop, and certainly hadn’t backed off since. Quite the opposite. Although she’d agreed not to go and find and kill Joe personally, Furiosa has what one might call a vested interest in the names of those men finding their way into the hands of the womyn, one might say. She doesn’t consider that to be breaking her not-quite-promise to Max, either.

“What’s going on?” Valkyrie eventually asks, and Furiosa clears her throat and explains from the beginning.

\---

“So whatever it is our investigation missed about him, you think it’s because they could never make a case.” Valkyrie sums up, when Furiosa is finished. “And now, for whatever reason, this guy is on his doorstep, trying to rattle your cage to get you to give him something new.”

“Pretty much,” Furiosa agrees, “except not ‘for whatever reason.’”

She, too, has made the connection about the timing of the 000 call. Unlike Max, she hadn’t reasoned out the inevitability of insurance, registration and taxes showing up in the future, but it’s too clear a line for her not to draw. She put him back on their radar.

“Well.” Says Valkyrie, thinking it over and apparently still taken rather genuinely aback. “Is this Constable Rictus as awful as I’m imagining?”

“Oink oink,” Furiosa agrees, tiredly, “and I think I’m going to end up sitting opposite him at a metal table, probably within the next few weeks.”

“Is there anything local he could bring you in on? Some kind of suspicion?”

“Not that I can think of, but that won’t stop him from making an excuse up. He caught me speeding the other day.”

“Shit, so he’s really on your case. Has he brought up your record?”

Ah. She transfers the phone to the other ear, and sort of shrugs.

“Not yet, but it may be a matter of time. I was a juvenile, so it’s technically sealed, but we know how much that means.”

“Right.” Valkyrie sounds thoughtful, though. Then, there comes the reluctant, long sigh that Furiosa has been expecting, dreading;

“Well, consider yourself officially out of the loop. Call me if you need anything, or else call me when it’s over.”

She doesn’t expect it to sting as much as it does. Furiosa closes her eyes tightly, and nods.

“Give ‘em hell, Val.”

“Same.”

The line goes dead. She needs to take a minute or two, or maybe closer to ten, before she creeps back up the stairs to slip into bed. Max doesn’t wake up this time, either.

Later, it will occur to her that Valkyrie never asks her whether or not Max is worth it. She appreciates the level of respect. The answer is, obviously, that of course he it. All she’s giving up is quick access to news that she wants- admittedly, that she wants very badly, but that’s still all right. Her house has officially been marked blown, unsafe for now until quite possibly the end of time, so this isn’t getting in the way of any new tenants. She trusts Valkyrie to decide what to do about the People Eater, and news of his fate will still be there for her to hear when she can get back to it.

To help him, the least she can do is wait.

\---

The next time Detective Rictus finds her, she is at the post office on her bike. Max is actually with her on this trip to town, but has been left behind at the pharmacy, running an errand for Nux and Capable for a box of ginger chews. They’re in a bit of a hurry today, on account of Capable being pretty miserable, so they have opted to divide and conquer.

When she comes out of the post office, Detective Rictus is waiting next to her bike. His car is parked, and he’s leaning up against the door. Furiosa grits her teeth, and swallows a groan.

“Something I can help you with, Detective?”

“Sure is.” He has smug grin on that she’d like to wipe off his face for him. She tucks her hands in her pockets, just in case. “License?”

She gets out her wallet. She’s always diligent about carrying the license, but has been doubly so since the fun last time with her car. He glances over her documentation, barely reading what they both know is perfectly correct.

“This all seems to be in order.”

Furiosa is just moving to take it back, when he says;

“But I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep you here awhile longer. You see, there’s been a bike stolen a county over.

“Oh no, really? How terrible.” Says Furiosa, with the flat tone of the very disbelieving. He nods, ignoring her tone.

“I’ve just got to run these plates of yours, make sure they aren’t the ones on the bike that’s missing. Desk’ll get back to me in just a minute or so.”

Like hell they will, she thinks, sitting down on the seat of her bike and preparing herself for the wait.

Sure enough, a minute passes. Two. Five. She is supposed to be picking Max up from the pharmacy by now. He’ll be on the curb, wondering what’s taking her.

“Truth is, I don’t know what you girls all see in him.” Detective _Eric_ says. Furiosa breathes a huff out through her nose, and looks at his car. Condescendingly, he assures her; “Any minute now.”

“And if I just got on my bike and left?” She points out, because it’s bullshit, such bullshit, and she wants him to know she knows it.

“Well, I guess that’d probably qualify as fleeing the scene, wouldn’t it?”

Ten minutes stretches into twenty. Thirty. She can wait here all day, she decides, this is wasting his time as much as it is hers. (The key difference, she knows, is that he gets off on it.)

“He told you he was a cop, then?”

This is a tester question, a mild little nothing, to see if he can get his hooks into her. She glances up at him, narrows her eyes, and doesn’t say a word. She’s glaring at him so hard that the hand Max sets on her shoulder about makes her jump out of her skin.

“Hey,” he says, worriedly, looking her head to toe, and up again, and she realizes that he must have waited for about twenty minutes longer than he’d expected, worried, made the walk to check if she was still trapped here, and found her here in the parking lot like this, apparently unharmed.

“Max,” she says, “this is the nice detective I was telling you about. He’s just running the plates of my bike to make sure it isn’t stolen, only it appears the system is taking a little time, that’s all.”

One of the things she’s never had a chance to see before is Max under this kind of pressure, but he doesn’t disappoint. His gaze slips seamlessly from her, across the ground, up and over and eventually to the face of dear Detective Rictus, who is too stubborn or too stupid to quail.

At first, anyways. By about the thirtieth second of dead fucking quiet, the wind has gone out of his sails, some.

“Plates are fine,” he says, gruffly, as he opens his car door, slips into the seat, and stares out the window at them, balefully. The best he can do as a parting shot is a short, sharp; “No statute of limitations on murder, Rockatansky.”

He pulls out, and Furiosa feels Max coil up, oh so subtly, under her hand.

“How long did he keep you waiting?” He wants to know, but subdued, waiting for a reaction, and not to the question he just asked. Max wants to know if the word, _murder,_ is going to be something that scares her, something that they have to talk about.

“Come on.” She answers, and grabs him by the collar, pulls him into a kiss, “I’m mad as hell and if I throw you down right here, he’s definitely going to have an excuse to give me another ticket.”

It answers his question, that’s for sure.

\---

Max has her pull up in front of the coffee shop and tap the horn, twice, until Nux throws open the upstairs window and sticks his head and shoulders out.

Max affects a quick tossing gesture, and Nux nods, getting ready. When he throws the box of ginger up into the air, Nux catches it with perfect ease. He looks at the package with surprise, and then down at Max in confusion. Furiosa hadn't realized that this was going to be a surprise.

“For Capable. Give ‘em a try.” He calls up, and then settles his arms around her waist again. Furiosa knows that he’s less than comfortable with gratitude, so she pulls the bike out again, fast, before Nux gets a chance to respond.

\---

They aren’t talking about it, because that’s still a bad idea, for all the same reasons, but now that Max has seen Rictus it seems to be wearing on him a little harder.

“If I’m worse, lately, it’s because it-”

She shifts herself a little bit closer, and strokes her hand through his hair. It’s unseasonably hot out tonight, so they’re out together on the porch, listening to the crickets in the dark. She sits on the top step, and he sits on the next one down, between her knees, both facing out.

“It’s fine.” Furiosa says, rubbing her fingers through Max’s hair again. “I get it.”

He has a glass of ice water beside him, and the condensation leaves new, intersecting, damp rings on the wood whenever he reaches over her leg to pick it up for a sip, and set it back down. The moon is bright enough for Furiosa to appreciate the pattern of intersecting circles.

This time, when he brings his fingertips back, he draws them down the top of her thigh, leaving three shivery cool lines of ice water on her skin. Furiosa bends over him, cheek on top of his head as her legs come up with goosebumps. Max blows, sending the water droplets slipping down the outside of her leg in three long, cool trails, and she shivers again, giving his hair a tug to get him to look up and back at her.

“Stay the night.”

Even though he did yesterday, even though he did the day before, too, and the night before that she was at his- it’s excessive, it’s young, it’s really not _them._ Not her. She doesn’t care.

Max grins up at her, and leans back onto her, elbows resting up on her legs, nodding a peaceful ‘of course.’

Of course.


	7. testing testing

Even when it isn’t nightmares, which come fewer and further between nowadays, he still dreams about Furiosa.

He always knows he has it bad for a woman when they’re in bed on the regular, and he still wakes up in the night dreaming of her, aching for her, needing to reach out across the sheets for her like a fire in his blood. Furiosa lets herself be woken, turns her sleepy head to him, and comes to him, cleaving their bodies easily to one another, pulling him overtop of her, resting him against her with a sleepy yawn, cradling him in her embrace.

\---

The next morning she’s naked, drinking a cup of Max’s coffee by her window, and he is watching her, when he sees her catch sight of something. Max sits up, and sees it too; the glint of light off glass near the horizon point of a nearby hill. 

Furiosa presses her finger to the tip of her nose, pushing it up ever so slightly, and it’s a gesture Max hasn’t seen in years; punk kids used to flash at police officers, carefully and behind their backs, sometimes boldly and to their faces before vanishing around corners. With the street kids, it used to mean _hey, pig._

The glint of light is a reflection. She thinks- she thinks that Detective Rictus is watching her, and Max knows that with this woman, if she thinks it, she is probably right.

Is what’s happening between them that personal? That he’s here, on the horizon, spying into her bedroom. That she’s lingering there, letting him know she sees him, confronting him with her nudity and her irreverence?

Because she waits, takes another long ruminative sip of her coffee, and only then turns away, heading back into her bedroom without bothering to close the blinds.

For the first time, Max begins to seriously worry on her behalf, more than his own. He can control an investigation, that’s a rulebook he has and he knows how to play by, but if Detective Rictus is losing the plot. If he is making this about wanting to break her- well, pretty fucking fast this is going to get violent.

There’s a certain type of police officer- not all of them, not even _many_ of them, necessarily, but a vile minority, that cannot stand to have their authority resisted. These are men and women for whom any challenge is a threat to be obliterated. Furiosa’s brand of wild-willed disrespect will push an officer like that into all sorts of petty games and humiliations to try to take his power back. If he’s peering at her, naked, through her window, then their horns are already locked.

It explains a lot. It explains the post office, the other day. It explains why he’s been in town this long, and Max hasn’t heard from him yet. Waiting to do an interview is normal, and waiting this long _could_ be interpreted as a kind of power game, designed to make him squirm, but really it feels a lot more like Detective Rictus is making a mistake.

Rather than comforting him, the thought makes Max worry. A competent man, he could deal with, outmatch, like a chess opponent. A bully is more likely to overturn the board and scatter all the pieces, even at the expense of his own reputation and career, and _that_ is a more dangerous outcome for everyone than even losing a fair game could possibly be.

Casually, lightly, he waits until Furiosa has gone to the closet to get dressed, and then goes to shut the blinds.

She says, as she gets her socks on;

“You know, I didn’t mention this, but he’s actually not from your police force. He’s AFP.”

And that- that makes a difference, actually. A big difference. He forgets, sometimes, just how American Furiosa is at the oddest moments, but that is something he is going to have to store to chew over later.

\---

It’s a weird start to an even weirder morning. They have their appointment at the nearest sexual health clinic, a two hour drive out of town (she laments a little on the way about the sexual and reproductive care in rural areas.) Admittedly, the drive only takes two hours because Furiosa has to take it a cautious five under the posted limit, which feels like a crawling pace to them both. Max doesn’t spot Rictus on their tail, but Furiosa says that he’s a better driver than she’d originally given him credit for, and he’s snuck out at her before. Max trusts her.

Max finds himself shifting like a teenager, partially because of the appointment ahead, partially because of the truly frustrating speed. He slouches down with his knees against the dashboard. Nux is covering him at the shop. Trading an hour here and an hour there is an arrangement they run for one another fairly frequently, mutually, begun because Capable has so many appointments. Nux is a good kid, and tried at first to pay him for the extra hours, though Max steadfastly refused; the least he can do is let him return the favour.

The waiting room for the office is awkward, mostly because it’s empty, except for them and a boy who still has severe acne, whose voice breaks when he asks his friend on the phone if he caught the match last night. The posters on the walls are all educational, in a soft and not quite graphically sexy kind of way, designed to catch the eye. Teenagers wrapped around each other with posted slogans about condoms.

Max feels impossibly fucking old. All he and Furiosa can do is sit and try not grin at each other, because it’s already clear that this is going to be a nightmare, but at the very least worth a laugh.

\---

The whole of Max’s exchange with the sexual health nurse is a thing of confusing glory. It doesn’t help that the woman administering the questionnaire is clearly a little flustered by the situation, so her tone is extra-businesslike.

“Have you ever had sex?"

“...yes.” Says Max, with as much dignity and reserve as he can muster.

"Vaginal or anal.”

A nod. Yes.

“With how many partners have you had sexual intercourse in the last year?”

“One.”

“What methods do you currently use to prevent a pregnancy?”

“A vasectomy.”

This takes the nurse aback, as though she doesn’t understand what he could possibly be doing here, then. This is apparently the moment, going by the look on her face, that Furiosa decides that this is going to be a _shitshow_ and she is taking no responsibility for what happens when it’s her turn, if this woman looks at her like that.

“How often do you use condoms with vaginal sex?”

“Currently? Always.”

“How often do you use condoms with anal sex?”

Er. “...not applicable?”

“Have you ever been told by a doctor that you have a sexually communicated disease?”

“Sort of. Cold sores, orally.”

“Have any of your partners ever had a sexually transmitted disease in the past?”

“The same.”

“Cold sores?”

“Yeah.”

“Any appearance of sores on your genitals?”

“No.” Jesus. Really. “Orally.”

It goes on, like that, from there.

The part of it that astonishes Furiosa, of course, is when the nurse gets to the question,

“When was the last time you had an HIV test?”

And that is going to entail admitting something. He looks at her for a minute, and doesn’t look at Furiosa, exactly, but decides that if they’re doing this, they’re doing this.

“Close to fifteen years ago.”

It had been his idea, that they come in for the process together, after all, and he’s cautiously sure that she will understand, from this answer, that this is how long he has been either monogamous or abstinent. Jessie… _died_ seven years ago, and they’d been married the six years before that, sleeping together for the previous two, so fifteen years is how long it has been since his last HIV test.

It’s Furiosa’s turn next.

Max’s face has been entirely straight this entire time, but Furiosa takes care of that _do you use condoms for anal intercourse?_

“Don’t need to, do I? It’s a medical grade silicone strap-on, I can just boil it on the stove top.”

He just chokes, completely unsubtly, because her, but mostly because of the squeamish look on the nurse. Max puts his face down in both hands. When he has the fit suppressed, about four questions later, he looks up at Furiosa, who looks altogether too pleased with herself, and shakes his head. 

\---

“Well, that was mortifying.” Furiosa says, in the parking lot, stretching to get the kinks out of her back. “Let’s never do that again.”

“Not planning to,” Max agrees, and he’s watching her, so he sees the moment where she thinks of something she finds funny. He arches an eyebrow at her, and she shakes her head, explains;

“It’s been nearly a decade since I was monogamous.”

That sets him to smiling, slipping into the passenger seat of the car.

“It’s been more than two since I wasn’t.”

He’s been honest in there, in here, with her, so she slips behind the wheel and thinks for a moment, before saying something out loud that she generally doesn’t like to. He sees her make the decision to tell him, offers the truth up like a careful, tender gift.

“One of my tubes is tied. Other side was an ectopic pregnancy.” She puts the keys in the ignition, but waits to turn them. Admits; “I don’t like to talk about it, because of the narrative people have for things like that. It wasn’t _like_ that, not at all. But it was- it does still bother me, that the closest thing to ever killing me was my own body going haywire.”

Like a game of chicken, rushing towards each other at breakneck speeds down the same road, Max watches the window, and nods. Says;

“I was married.”

The words sound like they come out through broken glass. Furiosa flinches, but he knows it’s because she can _hear_ that there was no divorce, there, and no separation. That there has been no one else since.

“Thanks for coming with me, today.” She says, as they pull out, slowly.

“My idea,” Max reminds her, still looking at nothing much at all, but to himself he sounds a little better, sounds like he knows what she is driving at. It was… fun, in a weird way, just as much as it was terribly vulnerable. It felt a little giddy, doing it with her there.

Still. She takes him home, and kisses him a tender goodbye, leaning over the gearshift to do it, making it good and long, because it may be a little bit- he knows she’s thinking he’s going to need his space after that one, so he takes her by the hand, overtop of the gearshift, and squeezes.

“Come in for coffee tomorrow?”

She wouldn’t have ever missed it, he needn’t really have asked, except that just this once, part of her might have been tempted to give him his space, give him a few extra hours without having to see her, to let him find his way to her when he was ready. It’s heartening to be able to prove her wrong.

“It’s Capable’s show tonight. Toast wanted to go. I’ll be back by midnight, though, if you need to get me at home.”

He gives her a little nod, and slips out of her car.

\---

Max makes it back to his place, and heads on in to have a nap- and to put some more serious thought into Detective Rictus.

Something missing from the puzzle is why Rictus is here at all. He’s staying, Max will grant, because Furiosa is probably killing him- because he can feel his ego being pared away one miserable layer at a time by her glorious, caustic voice, and because he associates her with his own obliteration. But he came here, originally, for Max.

Why?

The case had never gone anywhere. There were a few reasons for that;

Max was a police officer, and that entitled him to a certain amount of leeway.

The victim, Johnny the Boy, had been a gang member, a psychopath and a sadist, and everyone in the department had known it and had known his work. Clean up one or two of a man’s kills, and you don’t shed any tears when he turns up on the morgue slab.

There never actually had been much evidence; Max had been careful, even in his rage- technically that could work against him in a court of law. A man avenging... the things he had been avenging, there might have been a case for a lack of criminal responsibility, irresistible impulse, understandable insanity- it would have been bullshit, sure, but juries buy sentiment. But if Max had been caught using the measures he did to obliterate any forensic trail, that sure as hell would have eliminated any chance of playing the grieving husband.

Grieving father.

Anyways, back then, he hadn’t really thought much about the idea of jail. The precautions had been habit, more than anything, had been an expression of a feeling of an icy, ruthless effectiveness, not any desire to protect himself or stay free of the law.

Which brings him to the last, and most important factor in the case never having made it to trial;

Everyone, _everyone_ , every cop, officer, even the bloody crown (a young father himself) who had looked at the evidence, then over the table at Max with bewildered dismay in his face, every single one of them had understood. 

It was just a matter of a few mutual nods, a few trips to the shredder, and a pat on the shoulder from his Super, a soft, _I’ll need your badge and your gun on my desk, son._

He’d given them up without a word, and walked out to his car, called Jessie’s mother to ask her to come deal with their things- yes, all their things, even his- and had been on the road later that night. If questions were ever asked, after that first fateful night, and the decision that this was an unsolvable crime, then he never heard about them.

So why now? Yeah, he’s back on the map, but it’s more than that. He wouldn’t have been too hard to track down in the months and weeks afterwards, he was still using a bank account back then and that would have provided a paper trail. Something changed, but it didn’t change right away.

And why, of all people, Rictus?

Possibility one; glory? It might make a splash in the media, a hell of a scandal, if he could prove that kind of conspiracy. But that would take a lot of effort, a _lot,_ and Rictus has yet to demonstrate that he has it in him.

If Rictus is federal, and Furiosa is right, then it would make sense that he’d received Max’s case. The AFP can sometimes cover misconduct among other police forces, and if they believe his crimes to be in any way ongoing, then they’d stretch across state lines, he supposes. Normally he’s sure that would have been picked up by internal, but if evidence of the cover-up were extensive enough then it might have been handed over in some sort of power grab. Although the AFP do generally outrank their State counterparts, it would be unusual for them to be assigned something like this, as oversight is not- or did not used to be in their purview. 

Possibility two; personal emotional satisfaction. Something about Max does bother Rictus, and he wants to see him locked up- or if not locked up, at least suffering. There is some connection between him, and Rictus, that is pushing him to it, something he doesn’t know about. But that doesn’t explain the timing, either, because there certainly isn’t anything Max has done in the last seven years that would link back to this man. Rictus is a detective, not a constable, so he’s been on the force awhile, longer than Max himself ever was, in all likelihood. But that’s interesting, too, because Max is also sure that he never met, or even heard of him back home, and honestly for Rictus to be an officer with that kind of promise, in a state force as small as Max’s, close enough to him that he would have access to the file on the unsolved Johnny the Boy homicide-

What the hell is going on here? Who is this guy? He gets up to go try to find the badge number that Furiosa left on a paper somewhere in the house. As he searches, he continues to ponder.

Possibility three; someone else is involved. Rictus may be here at someone else’s behest. Whose, Max has no idea. Someone who either liked Johnny, or someone who disliked Max.

He doesn’t yet know what to make of it. And, unfortunately, just then is the moment the doorbell rings.

\---

“I’m sorry to bother you,” says Capable, from the front step. She looks radiant tonight, hair a fiery wreath around her, stomach a gentle swell under her blouse. “I’m just on my way to Furiosa’s, she’s giving me a ride to work, and I wanted to- would it be all right if I came in?”

Max shakes his head, somehow meaning ‘yes, no problem,’ and steps back, letting her over the threshold.

Capable is so often in the company of Nux that he isn’t sure he’s ever spoken to her on his own before. She’s certainly never been over in his house before. He clears his throat, looks her over, and asks the only thing he can think of;

“Water?”

“No, thank you, I shouldn’t.” She says, making a face. He knows why, knows it’s a very long drive and she’s pregnant, knows Jess needed to pee every fifteen minutes for months-

“There.” Capable says, stopping his train of thought cold. “There. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

The look on his face, she means, and Max does her the courtesy of not playing dumb.

She knows, then.

“Furiosa.” He says, clears his throat. “I haven’t-”

He winces as soon as he says it. It sounds like he’s trying to engage her in some sort of conspiracy.

“That’s okay.” Capable promises, softly, right away. “Furiosa isn’t the kind of woman who would expect you to. I just wanted to come by to ask if there were anything at all I could do.”

Do? He doesn’t know what she means.

“I know I live where you work, so it’s hard for me to make myself totally scarce, but.”

Oh.

“Not necessary.” And then, at her searching gaze, he shrugs.

Capable seems to sense that this is all she will get from him on the subject, and takes a thoughtful step forwards, and then another.

She gives Max, to his still and startled surprise, one soft kiss on the cheek, before nodding. Telling him;

“I won’t tell Nux. He tries, but he’s really bad with secrets. And that’s coming from me.”

Max smiles at her, just ever so slightly, and when she smiles back, gives her a curt and sincere nod.

Capable leaves- she will be late for work if she doesn't hurry, and Max goes to his bedroom to put his head under a pillow and try to get a bit of rest, and not think of any of it for just five minutes.


	8. escalatation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: this contains the most graphic of the police harassment in this story, with mild sexual overtones in the violence. 
> 
> Note: this is a short chapter, but is quite honestly I think my favourite I've written for this story or the other, in terms of intensity. I hope you enjoy as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> Thank you kindly to all the reviewers so far, you guy are the reason I stay excited enough to update this often.

It’s actually just her and Toast, watching and waiting for Capable tonight, otherwise Furiosa might have cut out early. She honestly just isn’t in the mood. But, as is often the case with Toast, they haven’t managed to get the time together alone they’ve wanted to in a while- Furiosa forever owes her a coffee, owes her a drink, and tonight she buys her a beer while Capable plays a soft jazz piano in the background.

Toast fills her in on what happened with Cheedo. In all, it’s about what Furiosa expected;

“A mild crush, I guess, turning into a bad one, a few tasteful and tactful inquiries about the possibility of something mutual, an unconditional rejection.”

Soft heartbreaks. Toast tears up a little into her beer, but is through the various stages of being stung and just into feeling a little morose about it, and maybe a little humiliated, which Furiosa can understand.

“I don’t blame her, obvious. She can’t change being straight any more than I can change being gay, or whatever, but it’s just one of those things that stings. It doesn’t make it easy that she needed me. It makes me feel guilty. I didn’t think I was being her friend just to get- you know, in her pants, but now- I feel like I’m walking away from supporting her because she won’t sleep with me, and that’s such an _asshole_ thing to do.”

“You’re not.” Furiosa reassures her, softly. “And Cheedo knows you’re not, Toast. Did you move in with her thinking it was going to be some couples thing?”

“No.” And when Furiosa prompts her, with a nod, she allows. “I moved in with her because I cared about her, and I could tell she was scared out of her mind.”

Furiosa nods- and it’s a shitty deal, all around, that she doesn’t blame them for not knowing what to do with.

“Look at it this way. You got into a bad situation, but you did it for the right reasons. At every step of the way, I have watched you do what you can, with the tools you have available to you. Sometimes things go wrong, sometimes we make calls that in retrospect, we shouldn’t have. But you should have a lot of respect for yourself, because you do a hell of a lot with what you’ve been got.”

Capable finishes her song, as Toast’s shoulders sag with relief, and she lowers her head a little, relieved at the benediction.

\---

The three of them are driving back together, Furiosa, Toast, and Capable, when the topic of Max comes up.

“How are things going there, anyways?” Capable asks, flushing a little at the presumptuousness. While Furiosa has a sort of carte blanche to ask her girls anything (and she and Toast have grilled Capable tonight on every aspect of affianceed life, from whether Nux can cook to what he’s game to _eat,_ if you take Toast’s meaning) but they sometimes have trouble asking her questions in return.

Because the relationship should not be a tremendously unequal one, Furiosa makes an effort to answer, where anyone else might get a cold shoulder and a ‘fuck off’ stare.

“Good.” She says, obliquely, and then starts to smile, as the silence stretches on expectantly. Caves; “ _Incredible._ ”

Toast crows, and Capable grins at her knowingly, sinking back into her seat.

“And now that you’ve got all of mine, the chances that you’re going to give us any details?”

Furiosa opens her mouth to try to find a way to back out of this without blushing, and then she hears the siren.

“Shit,” she murmurs, and then “ _shit,_ ” because how could she have been so foolish as to forget?

Furiosa pulls to the side of the road, and closes her eyes, while Toast asks what’s happening, and Capable digs her fingers into her knees.

She is just rolling the window down, when the familiar face of Detective Rictus appears, bending down to her window.

“Something I can help you with, Detective?” She asks, not with the slightest hope that it’ll make it go any easier. She offers him her license, which for once, he ignores.

“You’re going to need to get out of the car, ma’am.”

This is enough of a break from the script, and Furiosa has had a sufficiently long day that she pauses for a moment, looking up at him to see if he’s serious. His eyes are narrowed, and his expression is ugly.

Could she drive her way out of this? Probably, yeah, if she peeled out right now, but it’d just give him the ammunition he needed, and if he were to catch up to her it might very well get Toast and Capable in serious trouble as well. Rough riding down a bad road in a police chase with a pregnant mother on board is not what you want to have to do, not on a night this dark.

“What’s this about?” Capable asks, from the passenger seat, in the face of Furiosa’s stony silence. She leans over with the soft and reasonable smile that, in any other situation would be the right expression for her to wear. Rictus doesn’t even so much as look at her, so Furiosa answers;

“Stay quiet, stay here. Everything is okay.”

And because right now as she sees it she has no other choice, Furiosa steps out of the safety of her car, and faces up to him, even though he’s twice her size and it’s pitch black out here, moving until they’re standing toe to toe.

Rictus has gone a little bit off the handle since she spoke to him last, she can’t help but think. She wonders when this stopped being a job for him, and started being personal. The thing with her window this morning had been unsettling, in a deep and personal way, and it makes this whole encounter all the more uncomfortable. Furiosa folds her arms over her chest, and meets his eyes in the dark, watching his face. He’s bathed unevenly in his own headlights, in the flashing red lights of her fourways.

“I had a report of this car pulling out of the parking lot of a bar earlier tonight, with a possible drunk driver.”

Fuck. Furiosa hasn’t had more to drink than water, but of course he doesn’t know that. This is his version of a perfect trap.

“I’m sober, Detective, but I’d be happy to take a breathalyser if you have any concerns.”

But that, of course, would be too easy.

Rictus stands close enough to her face to smell her breath, and Furiosa focuses on keeping it even, slow and level- and then opens her mouth to ‘hah’ at him, letting him see it’s the truth. She hasn’t had a sip.

Far be it for that to stand in the way of his story, of course.

“I’m going to need to see you walk in a straight line down the side of the road, Miss Imperatore, arms spread out.”

It’s a waste of her time, and of his, and it’s only the sight of Capable’s and Toast’s pale faces looking at her through the glass that lead her to step over and obey. Anyways, the walking test she passes easily.

“Are you the designated driver?” Rictus wants to know, turning his light on the two women in the car.

“No,” Furiosa answers, “none of us are really drinkers. The only one who’s had even a beer is the girl in the backseat. Again, I’d like to be able to take a breathalyser to prove it, if you happen to have one on you.”

Still no acknowledgement of the request. He puts his flashlight beam right in her face, forces her to squint.

“I’m going to need to see you walk that line again.”

Stepping away in the dark. She waits, feeling the first shiver of real disease go down her spine, as the flashlight beam points towards his feet.

“Walk one foot in front of the other, towards me.”

Slowly, carefully, Furiosa does as she’s told, until she’s a few feet back, a comfortable five or so away from him. Too good to be true, of course. He spits;

“I didn’t say you could stop.”

Four feet, three feet, two feet, and she stops again. A shiver crawls down her spine at the malice in his expression, and she’s so far from her car now that she can’t hear Capable or Toast whispering to each other, any more. They are far enough from her car now that if she did need to make an ill-advised bolt for it, he would be able to stop her.

“Max Rockatansky is a murderer,” he tells her, pitched low and mean, “a sadistic sonofabitch who used his job title to get away with doing one of the sickest things to a man that I’ve ever seen.”

“A sadist on the police force?” She asks, eyebrows raising. “That doesn’t seem right.”

His lip curls at her in a sneer.

“It’s like you’ve got this script in your head, like you’ve decided who the characters are and what it all means, and that he somehow deserves your protection. Next time you and I speak to each other, it’s going to be over a sit down at a table. You know what that’s like, Furiosa, and is that really what you want?”

A step towards her puts him so close she can feel his breath on her face. So he has dug up her sealed record. Yeah, she has been arrested, has been cuffed and put in a cop car on more than one occasion, and now they both know it. It doesn’t bother her.

That’s just why this is when she realizes, grimly, that in addition to walking her away from the safety of her vehicle, he has also walked her out of the range of any sort of dashcam on his car, if he even has one installed.

“Max hasn’t told me a single thing about his life.” She points out, low, and ever so slightly more subdued, now, because it isn’t so much that she can’t take whatever he’s going to try out here, as she can’t take the idea of the girls in the car having to see him try it. “And if you think he’s dumb enough to just discuss the details of some kind of crime, if he even committed it, with the woman he’s fucking, then you sure as hell don’t stand a chance at pinning anything on him.”

“I'll need to see your drivers license” he says, “back at the car, please.”

Furiosa sighs, as though in exasperation, a little worried that he has somehow got the smell of her blood in the water, and leads him back into the light, towards her car.

He walks close behind her, keeping the beam square on her to let her know he’s watching her step. Her spine is crawling, but it’s also a miscalculation, because Furiosa knows what’s happening when the light jerks dramatically, and can let out a gust of breath before he’s on her, before he slams her into the side of her car.

Without that split second of warning, she would probably be spectacularly winded. Fortunately, she isn’t, though her ribs still shout at her in pain, and her heart flips over when she hears Toast let out a short, sharp scream. Rictus keeps her there, and leans down over her. For a brief second, his whole body is up against hers, in a way that would be familiar if it were someone else.

“Tell me what you know about the man who killed his family, or we can put you in handcuffs, right here, right now. You really think these two are gonna do so well with that?”

“Tell you what, sweetheart, I don’t think handcuffs are going to do it,” Furiosa grits back, low and tight, just enough for him to hear. “I think we’re going to have to get it over with. You want those two girls to know how big and scary you are, you’re going to have to just turn me around and _hit_ me, because other than that I don’t see any way of you walking away from this without feeling pretty fucking small.”

He takes her by the shoulders, and slams her down again, and shit, that time he gets her- the air leaves her lungs in a mean rush, and she has to gasp on the intake. When she talks again, it is a nasty, mangled snarl.

“Think once in the jaw would do it, big man? Or are you gonna need to take your belt off?”

“Furiosa.”

It isn’t his voice. It’s Capable, who has left the front passenger seat, is standing across the car from them, is visibly pregnant now and clutching her dress about her belly in such away that simultaneously looks protective, and accentuates the fact.

She can _feel_ Rictus see it, feel him get ahold back on his temper, feel him remember there are witnesses here, and apparently one witness with a risk of medical complications, a witness who has her cellphone in her hand and is beginning to dial.

“Get back in the car,” he says, stepping away, and barking again, when neither of them move, “ _both_ of you, do it. Sit there, shut the fuck up, and wait for me to get back.”

Capable is waiting for her, and so Furiosa does, getting to her feet and slipping over to the drivers side, falling back into her seat with a grateful rasp. Capable follows suit.

“You do _not_ get service on that out here.” Toast whispers to Capable, in terrified, angry hysterics.

“Of course not, but he doesn’t have to know that,” Capable hisses back, and Furiosa feels for a sick moment like she’s going to burst into laughter, because what a time to bluff.

There’s a few seconds of stillness, and then the crunch of boots on gravel roadway, as he returns to the car with his ticket book, and something else in his hand. He’s just at the rear fender, and Furiosa is wondering what the hell he could possibly write her up for this time, when she hears the _snickt_ of a collapsible baton extending. It’s familiar, and as unmistakable as the sharp crash of glass breaking, which follows next. She actually feels the car rock with the impact. She’s so tightly wound she flinches, terribly, and Toast and Capable both let out quiet screams.

Mean and triumphant, Rictus joins her at her window, leans too far in, and tells her;

“Looks like I’m going to have to write you a ticket for a broken taillight.”

Toast is breathing, short and sharp, like she’s trying to push down panic. Furiosa can hear the shivery little intake of breath Capable makes, like she’s about to burst into tears of frustration.

“Write the fucking ticket,” Furiosa agrees, between her teeth, jaw set in a furious and sharp line, knuckles of her good hand white where she’s gripping the wheel, “and next time we see each other, you’d _better_ arrest me. Got it?”

\---

They make it home at two am, and go to Capable’s little apartment, the one she shares with Nux. He hadn’t been there tonight thanks to a flu, and had apparently fallen asleep early enough not to realize that she was running late- when the noise they make coming in does wake him, he starts out groggy and confused, and quickly ends up protective and horrified, sitting near his fiancee and combing her hair back with his fingertips, slow and tender touches the two of them are normally too shy to engage in, ever in front of the others.

Toast sits at the window seat and just predominately swears, spitting profanity at odd intervals, because the _bastard,_ he was such a fucking _prick,_ while Furiosa winces and leans against the doorway, barricading it with her back and listening intently for the sound of any approaching motors.

She knows there’s no way, no reason that he’s going to come after them again tonight, but her brain won’t stop tricking her into thinking she can hear a strange car approaching in the dark, and that this time, this time it is definitely Rictus.

Nux and Capable crawl to bed soon enough and fall asleep, and Toast crawls out the window onto the sloped roof to smoke a cigarette, but Furiosa stays just where she is, waiting the night out, eager for the dawn.


	9. red, green, and yellow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ADULT CONTENT. For serious. WARNING; Contains some of the more graphic and edge-play sexual behaviour in the story so far, involving two very enthusiastically consenting and engaged people, but that does involve police themes, restraints, and processing of police related stuff through (very mild, totally enthusiastic) reenactment.
> 
> Also, this story is now referring heavily and with spoilers to the events of MM1, and I highly recommend watching that film if you haven't. It's interesting how much foreshadowing there is to Fury Road, how much imagery the two films share.

Nux is waiting for Max in the shop the next morning, lights already on. A break in the routine of this kind isn’t ever good news, so he begins steeling himself right away.

As soon as Nux even starts to gets the words out, Max is moving past him. He takes the staircase two at a time up to their little set of rooms. Takes in Capable- sweetly angelic, takes in Toast, a little drained but fundamentally whole, takes in Furiosa.

Furiosa looks ready to burn the place to the ground.

Max is so _relieved_ to see her, his heart just about stops. He crosses to her in three quick steps, and, bolder than he would normally be in front of the others, kisses her temple.

“I need to talk to you downstairs.” She says, leaning into it, but eager to get him away from the others. He nods, takes her hand, and leads her down, sits her at one of the tables and makes her a very strong cup of coffee.

Furiosa tells him everything.

\---

They take an hour, and go through it together in detail, and that means bringing her up to speed on everything she needs to know about her local policing services. So, a little bit about organized crime in Australia, and the uneasy distinction between federal and state policing;

First of all, jurisdictional issues are a tiny bit of a quagmire. There is a federal police force, and there are state police forces, and each have closely twinned and sometimes overlapping layers of responsibilities. The simple answer is that the AFP covers crimes against the Commonwealth, while state police forces enforce state laws. But that led to all kinds of lovely, paradoxical divisions of power; Max was in charge of such nebulous duties as ‘upholding the law,’ responding to 000 calls, ‘crime prevention,’ and aiding in state registration and licensing of firearms. 

Now, theoretically, as long as no one ever called the police on a drug dealer the two compartments might have worked out watertight. In practice, the way it tends to sort out is that state deals with the legwork, on-call stuff and emergency responses, busts dealers in parks and chases after getaway cars at liquor store stickups. Federal chases down the networks of people who supply, or who flee from town to town, robbing liquor stores from state to state. It’s an uneasy situation, made worse by the fact that some parts of the country actually contract the AFP out to provide all policing services, which further erodes the line between what they handle and what they do not. Max had been state, and as such, responsible for the maintenance of order within his own small territory. 

When Max is done explaining, Furiosa nods, and segues into a very different sort of conversation.

“I think I’m going to be arrested.” She says, and Max remembers thinking, a month or so back, how good the sand would be as a spot for a murder, but that would cause more problems than it would solve. “But I don’t think he’ll try that without at least one interview with you, so you need to get ready.”

“I don’t know what to do to make him back off.” Max admits, cautiously, and is the immediate recipient of a very annoyed look. He holds up his hands, peaceably- he doesn’t mean to protect her. “He’s too emotionally involved. I’m not seeing a clean _end_ to it.”

That mollifies her, and she sips her coffee, slow and thoughtful. They’ve agreed not to talk about it, but she tests;

“He’s after you because your-" your wife's murderer, he hears her carefully not saying, "a criminal tied to you turned up dead.”

“One of them.” Max corrects, voice a little dry, sipping his coffee. “One of her murderers did, yeah.”

“Okay.” She says, voice a little raw in turn. He can feel her watching him closely, but can’t meet her eyes, has to just watch the window. “You know more about police work than I do. He’d have to be ordered off the case, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah.” Max agrees, thinking it over slowly, leaning back against the coffee bar, and working hard to snap himself out of it. Focus. “If it were his own boss we were going to, I could probably stand a chance at getting that done already, after his trick with the binoculars.”

“But not the tail light?”

“Happened to you. Even if it came from me, he’d know it was me taking your word for it, and there’s a good chance it might not get traction.” Which is stupid, but it’s how it is. He explains a little more; “If we’re going to turn him in for this, we need to be _beyond_ in the right.”

“It needs to be egregious,” she agrees, catching his drift with her usual ease, with her usual knowing nod, “and it has to be something he does to _you._ ”

“Violation of a code.” He agrees, with a nod. “But if we make the first complaint and it isn’t a knock out punch.”

“Because if we’re not believed, then we’re crying wolf, and once we’ve done that...”

Right. He nods, pleased that she’s there with him.

“Especially since the person we have to go to is going to be the highest ranked local officer, and he’s going to have to go to whoever Rictus is working for and make a case for having him pulled back.”

Furiosa looks at him, seriously, weighing their options, and clarifies;

“You’re sure he’s not local?”

“Rictus? No. Nowhere for him to be posted nearby.” He says, seriously. “Especially not if he’s attached to organized crime investigation. He’d be in one of the big cities.”

And that is edging up on some dangerous conversational territory. He looks at her, and wonders if this is still the right thing to be doing. Says;

“You need to expect it to be horrifying. When he takes you in there and hits you with the case details, you need to expect your stomach to lurch. And when it does, if you change your mind about what you want to tell him--”

For a second, from the look on her face, he can tell she wants to tell him to go to hell, that she would never, but after a heartbeat she does him the courtesy of believing him that it will be a bad. Beyond bad, that it may very well push her. Subdued, she tells him;

“I would accept you doing a hell of a lot, Max, for the reasons it sounds like you did them for.”

He shrugs.

“The police did back then.” But only because there wasn’t a lot of evidence, and because the police in question all knew him. Feelings were running high. He’s not counting much on the bonds of that brotherhood, now that there’s been time for some sober second thought. “But I’m not one of them anymore, not like Rictus is.”

“It brings us right back to him needing to be _really_ in the wrong.” She agrees. “And with evidence.”

Video footage, visible physical damage, or both, Max should think. He nods.

“I don’t get why him being from out of town is a bad thing?”

“Interdepartmental politics. Inter _agency_ politics. The differences between fed and state aside... We’re going to ask this officer to go to someone higher ranked than him and say ‘pull your kid out of my sandbox.’ It’s a tough position to be in.”

You may dislike them- he can make a good bet that the police working in the area already _absolutely_ dislike a cop like Rictus sweeping in, doing a job like this, but dislike isn’t going to get them anywhere, really. They need for a code to be broken. Not even a law, a _code._

“State is expected to be sort of resentful of intrusion. They have a reputation for resenting the interference and pushing back over nothing.”

“So it’s a matter of crying wolf, again.”

“Unless we can think of a reason to go to Rictus’s boss directly, but that’s- improper channels, and not as likely to get traction.”

Furiosa nods, turning all this over, thoughtfully.

“I’m just fucking pissed that he scared Capable and Toast so badly,” She admits, glancing back at the stairs. They can’t hear more than the occasional footstep, overhead, but the little sounds are reminder enough that it wasn’t just her this time. The thought hadn’t even occurred to Max, that she would experience this on that level first and foremost- he’d been preoccupied with the thought of Rictus pushing her into her car.

It’s no surprise, now that he thinks about it. The impatience and rage he’s been feeling at having someone he cares for threatened is what she’s getting a taste of now. His has been tempered by a deep respect for her and her ability to handle what she says she can, but it still hasn't been easy. It amounts to seeing someone else you care for, harassed, even if they technically can take it. He could tell her that Toast and Capable will be fine, but it doesn’t matter that they will. They have been dragged into it, period.

“I know.” He promises, and then leans over, to give her a short, grateful kiss, for being here with him and for being okay. “Nux said they were shaken by his putting hands on you?”

“He just threw me up against the car. Nothing permanent.” She assures him, and shows him her elbow- one little bruise, that’s all, barely the size of a quarter. Something in his chest unspools in relief.

The door to the shop chimes, and Ace Dubeau clears his throat, gruffly, headed for the counter. Max pulls back from her and gives her a nod of farewell, as she shrugs, and heads out to her shop for the day.

He sincerely hopes she locks the office door, puts up her ‘back in five mins’ sign, and just naps.

\---

She finds him after work. He’d been expecting the knock on his door. What he doesn’t expect is what she says;

“There’s something I need your help with. It’s a big ask.”

“Of course.” He answers, because he knows already, he’ll say yes to anything.

“Don’t say that until you hear what it is. But first, go get the handcuffs, then come with me.”

So, Max does.

They discuss it in the car ride, on the way to her garage. Or rather, Furiosa talks, and Max listens, absorbs, tries to wrap his head around it.

“The first time I was ever arrested, I was thirteen, and it’s too embarrassing to tell you about. They were pretty good about it, I hadn’t hit my height yet, so I don’t think they wanted to beat up a little girl. After that, though, it’s happened a bunch of times, and ever since it’s pretty much been a lot worse.”

He nods, unsurprised by any of this. The handcuffs, in the pocket of his coat, are a familiar and easy weight. The key is safely in the zipped up, inner breast pocket.

“But I stopped getting into most kinds of trouble when I really got into school, and that was twenty years back. I don’t remember what it’s _like_ when you’re getting arrested. And I don’t know what I’m physically going to _be_ like when he’s doing it.”

“Right.” Max agrees, catching the shape of it.

“So, we’re going to my garage, where we can shut the door on us and a car.”

“Right,” Max agrees again, a little amused now, glancing over at her and her nervous, prickly tone.

“So you can put me in handcuffs and throw me in the car.”

“Right.”

“So you see why you get the chance to say ‘no.’”

It isn’t the first time a girl has asked him to _arrest her, officer,_ and he’s never minded one bit. It’s very different with Furiosa, though, who not only has a history of actual arrests, but also the physical lash-out cues of a cobra. She may very well end up _really_ fighting him, and that is a whole different kind of game. Moreso, though, she’s right, there is a good chance that this is a part of her reality that she’s going to have to handle in the next couple of days. The only real way to avoid it is to get the hell out of Citadel, and he knows there’s zero chance of her agreeing to that.

“So are you saying no?”

“No.” He says, then clarifies; “I’m not. But the conversation is a hell of a lot longer than ‘arrest me, Rockatansky.’”

Her mouth twists. When they’d negotiated the handcuffs in reverse, it was a look he’d given her more than once. A peevish sort of ‘we don’t need to talk about this, I know I can take it’ face that they both share when they want to crash headfirst into something.

“For one thing,” Max says, “whether this is a sex thing or not, we’re going across a line you don’t touch without safewords.”

“Red, yellow, green.” Says Furiosa, immediately, and he nods- that’s fine, and it settles him down a little, it’s good that it’s a convention she knows, gives him a little more faith in the idea. 

“And,” she says breezily, “it could _sort of_ be a sex thing. If we wanted it to be.”

He isn’t shocked. He knows how she runs, in bed. But he does have objections, things that he has to say.

“It’s a terrible abuse of power. And honestly, maybe, but right now- I’m not going to be able to get past the fact that he could- that there’s this.”

This chance, however slight, that someone might do the real thing to her.

The thought, he can see, has occurred to her. She pulls them into her garage, puts them in park, and turns off the engine. She seems at a loss for a way to explain.

“I hate him,” is what she manages eventually, “and I want you. I trust you. So to me, it’s totally different. But I respect what you’re saying.”

He doesn’t think she’s ever said the words in that order, before, _I trust you,_ but it goes through him so profoundly that it makes him shiver.

“If.” He decides, holding up a finger, forestalling interruption. “If you’re into it enough that in the moment, you initiate, then I think I could do something for you. But it’d be _us,_ not strangers, not a roleplay. Us pausing a lesson for me to-”

Furiosa nods now and leans over to kiss him a warm and eager thank you, before checking;

“Don’t let me twist your arm into it. If this is against your better judgement-”

“I know my mind.” He assures her, and he’ll give himself that much. He may be a little bit mad, but he knows the whys and hows of it. Eating his girlfriend out while she’s handcuffed on the hood of his car, a little randy from being thrown around, that he can do.

A little nervous, but very eager, Max follows.

\---

It’s surprisingly hard to get started. He’s just- too fond of her, and the muscle memory is deeper buried than he’d realized. He takes one of her wrists, held passively, and pulls it behind her back, tests the way the prosthetic feels- yes, it’s strapped on so tightly it’ll behave enough like a normal arm if he cuffs it to the other- then releases them and steps back, frowning in consternation.

“All right. Now, if you were being cooperative, I’d have you here-”

He takes her gently by the waist, and puts her up against his car, lifting her arms and crossing them over her head, wrists atop her head. Her head tilts forwards, slightly, and she obeys- though with a clear and simmering sense of the ‘for now’ to her. He snaps a cuff on one wrist, pulls it down, takes the other hand by the palm and guides it gently to join the other, then has her with her hands behind her back. Carefully, he steps her back, and with a guiding hand on her he opens the car door, and with a careful hand on her head, guides her into sit. The Falcon is a two door, so he can’t actually put her in the back, but the passenger side will suffice instead.

It apparently helps him break back into the feel more than it does her, because she grins at him, totally impishly.

“So that’s what it’d be like to be arrested by someone who is clearly my adoring boyfriend.”

Max snorts, and helps her back out of the car, uncuffs her, and they start again. Incrementally, he decides, is the way to go; one level of force up.

This time, he instructs her spread her arms and lean forwards, so she’s off balance. He comes in from behind her, and locks his foot behind hers, forestalling her ability to kick. Says;

“Here’s where you ask questions- name, address, anything so they have to think, so they aren’t planning how to whip around and land a punch on you. Ignore anything Rictus says until he has you in the car. Focus on what he does.”

She nods, and lets him pull her, more quiet now, still a passive party to the arrest.

“Anyone who knows what they’re doing will have their handcuffs preset, so-” they click right on when he snaps one around her wrist. She keeps a little resistance in the other arm, makes it tougher for him to clasp her wrists together, but he’s confident she has no idea how little that kind of force actually makes a difference.

“Watch your head. He’s probably not likely to help protect it as he gets you into the car.” The good ones do, the petty ones don’t. Rictus strikes him as the latter.

In she goes, with a speed that makes him remember that he used to be good at this.

Furiosa is apparently seeing it too, now, and tries to climb back out without his help. Without thinking about it, Max pushes her back, with casual, economical force, moving her into the seat and shutting the door in her face. She would not be able to get out of his car without his permission.

Through the window glass, he sees the moment her eyes start to glint, and knows that next time, it’s on.

The next time, she resists him, and he still has her down so fast she’s laughing at the shock of it. The time after that, she fights, and he puts his weight into it, showing her what it’s like to be arrested by someone who is firm, but calm, who takes no chances and knows how to get a suspect into a car without hurting them.

From the seat, she narrows her eyes up at him, and he can see in her expression that this is strange to her somehow, not what she was expecting.

“You’re remembering being arrested by someone who wanted it to hurt.” He tells her, reaching down and stroking his fingertips over her cheek. Her eyes shut, and it’s as good as a nod.

“Come on out.”

He can do that for her, too.

Max hits her from behind like he would if he were dragging her off someone she was attacking in earnest, if she were screaming, combative, even possibly armed. He lifts her, takes her off her feet, drags her good arm into an excruciating bend that there’s no escaping, and isn’t surprised when this is the time she cracks, and really tries to fight back. Her foot stomps down on his- not an issue, in his boots, but then tries again and scrapes his shin. Max brings her down onto her front on the filthy, concrete floor, careful not to really harm her but quick enough that she gets a little bit of air knocked out of her.

She fights like a fucking demon. He fears for Rictus, if the man has any less idea of what he’s doing than Max does. Grappling on the ground with Furiosa, if he hadn't started out with the advantage, it’d be a close match. He takes a mean elbow to the ribs before he gets her, hands cuffed behind her back, hand on the back of her head with her cheek pressed cruelly to the cold, hard floor.

When he has her subdued, she keeps twitching, shivering against the concrete and gasping to catch her breath, before finally getting out a ragged, broken up little;

“Please.”

He knew she’d get there.

“Please what?”

“Please, Max, god fucking damn it-”

That’s his girl. He picks her up, manhandles her forward against the car, pushing her with her back against the door, hands trapped behind her. She staggers for balance, has to rely on him to catch her, brace her. Furiosa moans when he turns her back around, and sighs in dismay when he springs the cuffs.

“Fuck.” She rubs her wrists, and looks him over carefully. “I’m realizing just now I’ve known really incompetent police officers.”

“I can tell,” he agrees, dryly, and watches her mouth go dry, watches her lick desperately at her bottom lip. Offers; “Again?”

“Are you good?”

He has never known a woman to check so carefully, so knowingly, as Furiosa does. He thinks it’s because she’s aware of her own power, knows that she could, with her easy and instinctive authority, take him over easily and do him serious damage.

He smiles at her, and nods, and this time she steps forwards to meet him as he gets the cuffs out.

This time he uses her own momentum against her, gets her up against the car door with enough impact that she gasps. Max kicks her legs apart wider than he ever would if this were real, bends her forward at the waist and cuffs her hands behind her back, tight enough for her to feel the bite. Furiosa’s cheek rests against the roof of the car for a moment, and he likes that image, decides they’ll do this standing together, at least to start.

“Jesus, Max, get your fucking mouth on me-”

She orders him, a ragged, searing growl that he meets with a sound of his own, animal and challenging, he’ll do as he full well pleases with her. Right now, that means dragging her jeans down, with her underwear, just as far as her knees, leaving her standing there, exposed, against his car.

“Jesus,” she whispers again, hollow and hot, “Jesus Max, do it, please- please-”

He thought he might have trouble with this part, but it’s so very _her_ and him together that slipping a hand between her legs is easy.

Max stays standing behind her, bracing her up with the close press of his body, since her legs are trapped together with her jeans around her knees and her arms are cuffed behind her. It’s an excruciatingly vulnerable way to be on a hard concrete floor. He reaches out and holds her by the neck, too, and discovers that with his hand on her nape, his fingers can still almost close entirely around her throat. His fingers, which know her so well by now, make her jerk involuntarily, and he hears her bruise a knee against the car.

“Shit,” she whispers, not about the pain, he doesn’t think, head tipping back against the pressure of his hand, body shifting to try to get more of what she wants.

He can give her that. Max moves her again, feels the quaver in her voice through the hand at her throat, and manhandles her the few feet he needs to, around to between the front lights, to send her carefully sprawling out over the front of the car. Honestly, they’ve been circling around the idea of fucking on this thing since the day she first saw it. He’s gratified that she’s disoriented enough to apparently not realize where he’s put her for the first few seconds- and that when she does, she moans, bites her bottom lip, and tries to lift up to meet him. With her hands behind her back she can’t get far, but he knows what she’s asking for.

And no, in the end, no part of him feels anything other than darkly, wickedly pleased to spread his handcuffed girlfriend’s legs as far as her tangled jeans will allow, and to lick into her. She screams, low and strangled, and he takes a second to be thankful that there’s never any foot traffic out in Citadel this late at night, because in a normal city this would get the cops called on them.

Max lets her ride his tongue to a first orgasm, gasping and crying and swearing like a sailor, before he slips his fingers into her.

“You’re fucking wet, woman, you know that? You’re making a mess of my car.” He feels the shudder that puts through her from the inside.

Starting out slow is its’ own kind of torture for the both of them. She rocks onto his hand, with ragged little murmurs while he pumps his fingers in and out, building slowly in speed and force. Her voice raises, sending odd little echoes around the inside of the locked down garage, sound bouncing back at them off the rolled down tin doors.

Now, fingering her as hard as he is, Max has to lean up to put a hand on her shoulder to keep her still. He kisses her to muffle her because this place has next to no soundproofing, and the noises she’s making are pushing their luck, even at this time of night. 

He knows what he’s after, and fucks her with three fingers, then gives her fourth, provoking a shocked little hiccup and then silence. She sometimes does this, goes perfectly quiet when things are most intense. For four of his fingers, fucking her as hard as he can, she starts shivering almost violently, until her body gives in and tries to bow up off the car, fighting valiantly to escape.

Max puts the other hand around her hip and slams her back down, and forces the issue, curling his fingers up, rough, and he feels his heart soar as her eyes roll back and she goes all to pieces for him with a messy, moaning crash.

\---

Afterwards she is _shocked._ He feels it too, to be perfectly honest; it's the furthest he's ever broken her down. She sits next to him on her work bench, tucked against his side, and remarks, not for the first time,

“I didn’t know I even _could_ squirt.”

Max smiles, this time a tiny bit smugly, and holds her steadily closer, now again bending his head and kissing her bruised wrist.

“Well.” She says, in the end, setting her back against the edge of the table and straightening up, contentedly. “That belongs to me again. You were _absolutely_ perfect, Max. How are you feeling?”

“Ready to head home.” He admits, voice languid and unguarded, forehead tucked in the crook of her shoulder. “Mine or yours?”

“Mine. You drive.”

\---

It’s a strange phenomenon that the more time Max and Furiosa have together, the harder it becomes to leave one another. He supposes that after something as edgy as that had been, for them- for him in particular- it was natural that parting to go to work the next day would hurt like hell. She lingers in his shop shamelessly, ignoring the looks of everyone who comes in. She kisses him a full and hungry goodbye before she goes.

He settles in to wait the day out, with a sigh that is so hopelessly lovestruck that he has to laugh at himself.

Left to his own thoughts, he doesn’t expect for his good mood doesn’t manage to last long. They still, after all, have the problem of Detective Rictus and his escalating petty tortures. 

Rictus, who is actually currently approaching down the street, walking towards the _Open Road_ with a look of determination and malice in his eyes that there is no mistaking, even at thirty feet. Furiosa is still right there, too, unseeing, the screen door having only just banged shut behind her, making her way through the parking lot. 

Max finds himself stepping out from behind the bar, ignoring the fact that Ace is trying to get change from him, and heading for the door.


	10. devil in the details

“It had better be _me_ you’re looking for, Detective.”

Furiosa lifts her head up, and sees the whole wide wall of muscle that is Rictus, coming towards her. Whether he had been seeking her out or looking for Max, she can’t really be sure. Just, Max is now coming up behind her, passing her, heading towards the detective with such a determined stride that for a heartbeat she thinks he’s going to haul off and deck him.

Rictus thinks it too, apparently, and puffs up, spoiling for a fight. When Max just gives it to him, shoves him with both hands right in his chest, he staggers back, and then pulls himself upright again.

“Adding assaulting an officer to your problems, Rockatansky?”

“I’m assaulting an officer like she had a broken taillight.” Max answers, backing off, and Furiosa can hear that he wants to make Rictus lose his cool, lose his temper.

She takes three short steps back, out of the way, close enough to watch but willing to let him work.

“Are you done?” Max is asking, calm, icy, and mean “Are we ready? Are you going to actually ask me your questions, or are you going to keep fucking about in your own little stalking melodrama, angling after my girlfriend?”

That’s some weird, macho bullshit territory, and while it burns a little bit, she can tell the effectiveness of it by the way Rictus goes red. Max gets the benefit of the doubt. She takes another three steps back, trying to melt out of Rictus’s line of sight.

“Does your girlfriend know the truth about you, Rockatansky? The way the women in your life have a way of turning up dead? See- at first I thought I could show her the crime scene photos, what you _really_ did to that guy, talk her into testifying against you. But the way I’m coming to see it, she doesn’t seem to know a thing about you.”

Furiosa would be lying if she didn’t say she wanted to hear, wanted to know. Max spares a glance at her, like he’s nervous- and yeah, she can see that he actually is. What could he have to be afraid of?

Rictus continues;

“She doesn’t know about the cover up. Your name was never printed in the paper in association with Jessie’s, was it? And she never took your last name. She even know you were married?”

Rictus looks at her, obviously hoping for the point to land, but guesses quickly that his triumph has been forestalled. Furiosa schools her expression flat and neutral, and raises an eyebrow at him. It doesn’t exactly play with their plan of complete ignorance, but after last night she just can’t stomach giving him the point.

“There’s stuff she knows, there’s stuff she doesn’t. There’s stuff you clearly think happened that _didn’t._ So fuck off, Rictus, and come back to Citadel when you’ve got a case.”

“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Like another chance to get on the road, and give us the slip for four years.”

Rictus steps in closer to Max, which Furiosa can’t help but feel is a real mistake. His fists are clenched tight.

“See, I should be willing to let it go. I could have let it go. Everyone else did. But the way I see it, there’s one detail that just doesn’t add up. One question that no one’s been able to answer for me.” He leans in, puts his pig-face up in Max’s, and asks the only question, in the context of last night, that could possibly send a chill down Furiosa’s spine. “How did the body end up trapped in a set of police issued handcuffs?”

She feels her heart just about stop. Max looks at her, eyes wary, and then on seeing her expression, his face sort of- crumples up ever so slightly, and he jerks his head towards her garage. A clear message; _go._ They can talk later.

“So we do have something to talk about, then.” She hears Rictus, as she heads back towards the coffee shop, listening for once as she’s dismissed. Max has good judgement, and while she sure isn’t going to just blithely head off to work, she can watch this from inside the glass.

\---

Inside the coffee shope, Furiosa presses closer to the window, forcing herself to refocus on what is really going on at this moment. She can tell she’s jumpy, because when Nux materializes behind her, her heart just about stops in her chest, and she turns her head to give him a pointed stare for sneaking up. Nux ignores her, watching the argument instead.

“Capable heard raised voices. Should we call the police?”

“Definitely not.” Furiosa decides, moving to crack one of the windows open an inch, to try to hear what is going on outside. “Stay quiet and keep down, we’re going to eavesdrop.”

Nux breathes a curse, and comes forward a bit more to stand next to her, ducked behind one of the window curtains, listening to the murmur of voices from the parking lot.

“No address,” Rictus is saying, over-loud and accusatory enough that she catches the words clearly. Max, damn him, answers with a low rumble that she can’t make out from this distance.

“What’s going on?” Debbie asks, stepping up behind Furiosa, and reminding her of course that this is a public bloody coffee shop, that there are people here. Luckily, the other person, now standing to her left is Ace, who seems to give the situation an assessing glance, a short nod, and to ask Furiosa;

“That man hasslin’ you, hon?”

Jesus. She gives him a ‘shut the fuck up’ stare and looks back out the window.

“We’ll let your fella get a swing in.” Ace decides, approvingly, interrupting Debbie, who’s deciding;

“If there’s going to be a fight then I’m definitely calling the police.”

“If someone was going to get a swing in, it would be me.” Furiosa corrects them both, and Nux chokes a complaint, hurrying to intercept Debbie, who is going for the store phone. “And _no one_ is calling the police. Now everyone stay quiet so I can hear.”

“Furiosa?” Capable, hurrying down the stairs, as much as she can hurry, in her condition. “I called the police. They’re on their way. Do you want me to-”

Shit. She nearly hipchecks Ace out of her way as she heads out the door, past him, cursing other people for having the temerity to be _around_ in what is normally their own little ghost town at this hour. Things are usually so empty in Citadel that it’s a real pain when they’re not.

Max is standing still, and Rictus is hissing threats in his face. Furiosa derails this, stepping right in and putting a light hand on Max’s elbow, letting him know, casually;

“A customer,” white lie, “panicked, and called the police when she heard fighting. Depending on how close the nearest car is, you may not have long. Maybe five minutes, if someone is on our stretch of highway. Nux, Capable, Ace and Debbie are all watching from inside the shop.”

It doesn’t occur until she’s saying it that she sounds an awful lot like she is spelling out the reasons why they cannot kill this guy, stick him in his own trunk, and drive him on out into the sand.

Whether Rictus hears it too or not, she can’t tell, but he swears and goes to his car, maybe to call in or something. Furiosa takes the opportunity to look Max dead in the eye, try to guess whether he is just reacting at this point, or whether or not he has a plan.

Looks like a bit of both, from the glint in his eyes. She winces, and shakes her head slightly. They cannot afford to not think clearly here, even though she’s angry too.

“Nux will give you the afternoon off work, if you want to get out of here.” Furiosa proposes, softly, though it’s so early in the morning that it isn’t exactly the afternoon so much as the whole damn day, but still. Max is owed one.

She keeps him, with a hand curled in his shirt, because she’s unwilling to go until they’re sure Capable isn’t going to be pulled back into this anymore. Apparently, the spectre of another officer arriving on the scene is enough of a threat that Rictus slips into his car, swears, and pulls out, peeling out of town in a hurry.

\---

It does unsettle her. It shouldn’t unsettle her, but it does. She spends the afternoon turning it over and over. Max is- no, Max was a police officer- are those lines blurring for her just because of how he’d handled her last night? That’s stupid. It’s worse than stupid, it’s lazy, and she knows better than that.

But really, handcuffs.

They wouldn’t have been _the_ handcuffs, she reasons, otherwise they wouldn’t have been found at the crime scene. But honestly, they would have been just the same, and Max would have done who knows what to a person wearing them- well, she knows what. He would have handled them like he’d handled her, except then he’d killed them.

Fuck, no wonder he’d been reluctant last night.

She isn’t sentimental. Many people say that, and believe it about themselves, but she genuinely isn’t. She has burned her life to the ground and walked away more times than she cares to remember. She doesn’t hold much for symbolism and doesn’t tend to link meaning to physical objects, but really, _really._

Because there is no doubt in Furiosa’s mind that Max killed the guy. To be perfectly honest, there never has been. He'd just about confessed as much the night she'd been jumped at her garage. If he were an innocent man, she reasons, he would have felt compelled to say so by now. She’d just never blamed him, because she’d been introduced to the idea of his being a murderer in a moment of her own towering rage. Being angry with him for killing would have made her a hypocrite, when he was all that had stood between her and making the kill.

Her mind goes back to Joe and Splendid. Splendid, though Furiosa had been fond of her, had been just one of the girls. Not a lover. Not a _wife._ She thinks about what she would do to Detective Rictus if Max were to turn up-- she can’t even think it. She almost turns right back around on her heel to go back out there at just the thought- but adding fuel to the fire is not what they need right now.

But seriously, fuck being upset about the handcuffs. There are bigger problems at hand; this is Max and what is maybe the defining loss of his life. Yeah, the timing is unfortunate, but really, she’d been the one that has asked.

Furiosa has only slept one night in the last two, and has had what amounts to something of a shock. On top of what really amounts to a rough scene last night, her emotions feel a little turbulent. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s hitting her hard right now, probably because she’s had her first really kinky sex in ages and bottom drop is a thing that does happen. That’s all.

It's Max.

\---

Ace, of all people, gives them a drive up the hill to her place. They pile into the front seat of the pickup Furiosa fixed up for him a month back, and he keeps his hands so well clear of her legs as he operates the stick shift it’s nearly comical.

“You two take care now,” he says, and pulls out, with a rattle that she wants to tell him she could probably take care of, but now isn’t the time.

Instead, she leads Max straight around back, without stopping to check if Toast or Dag are home.

She wants to ask questions, wants to start debriefing, but pours two glasses of water instead, and brings them to the coffee table. Nods an aimless Max into one of the chairs. He sinks down, and gives her his thousand yard stare, probably without meaning to, but it makes her shiver and take a sip of her drink.

There’s something he’s waiting to be able to get out, so Furiosa lets the silence rest, drinks the rest of her drink, until Max is ready, until Max murmurs, as nervously as she's ever heard him;

“You might change your mind about me.”

Furiosa feels herself grow cold, and sets the glass down, very carefully.

“I’m sorry?”

“If he tells you something, and it’s true- and it may very well be. If you want me to leave Citadel after that, I will.”

She shuts her mouth, and shivers, and tries to decide how she’s reacting to that. Furiosa is angry, but she is also frightened- and maybe anger is winning out a little more right now, anger and indignity.

“You seriously think that I’m at a point in our relationship where I’m just capable of throwing you away?”

It’s a tremendously loaded way to put it, she realizes, but it’s a hurtful thing to hear.

Max’s eyebrows lift, and he watches her. She feels her temper shift, lift higher.

“I don’t know how much of me you understand, then, if you think that violence shocks me, and if you think that I’m taking this, us, that lightly.” She’s been withstanding police harassment for him for weeks now. Had cut Valkyrie and the news about Splendid off. Had-

“Stop.” He says, interjecting shortly. “Stop. Furiosa, I’m sensible of that-”

It’s such a mild way to put it that she feels her hand curl into a fist in frustration, folding tight in her lap. Is he sensible of it? Well then.

“I know. I know. Me too.” But he searches for words. “It’s just- you have to trust my judgement enough to hear me.”

“I hear you.” She says, breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth. “But I’ll be honest, I feel like you’re doubting me, and I hate it.”

“No.” He says, leaning forwards, reaching to try to put a hand on hers, and then jerking back, an abortive motion. 

“Furiosa- you’re- there are going to be some graphic details. Details of amputation, details of torture.”

That is what it takes. 

The phrasing, _details of torture_ , snaps her out of it, and she really does actually listen to what he is saying. He is warning her that what happened may be something she finds reprehensible, may be something she finds unforgivable. Yes, even her, even with her bent standards and high tolerance for vigilante justice, he knows that and he is not diminishing her, and he even in so knowing. Max has never once in their entire relationship underestimated her, and Max still thinks he has cause to warn her.

Delicately, carefully, she pulls one knee up to her chest, and wraps an arm around it, leaning back, widening the gulf between them. Furiosa he looks at him and tries to imagine what it would be like if she didn’t think he was a good person, any more.

What would she think of herself, for letting him in this far, if that were true?

“Max.” She says, voice tearing. “Max, you have to tell me. I don’t care about strategy.”

“Furiosa.”

 _“Max._ I don’t care, you have to fucking- don’t just sit there, you fucking owe me this.”

He watches her, muscles in his jaw tight, and shakes his head, asks;

“Do you mean that?”

“No. Yes. I don’t fucking know. No. Max.” Her heart is in her throat. What is she even trying to say? “No. No, I don’t want to hear it.”

Why doesn’t she want to know, now? Foiling Rictus had been the original reason, but now it feels like a flimsy pretext. She shakes her head, though. She doesn’t. She definitely doesn’t. (She thinks it is possibly because she has the sudden, horrible knowledge, that if it is bad it will make her cry, and she hasn’t _cried_ since she lost her god damned arm, she isn’t going to start now.) Instead she asks the thing that she thinks really matters;

“Why did you do it?”

She doesn’t mean why did he kill the guy. She knows that, thanks to Rictus, even has a name connected to the tragedy, _Jessie._ Jessie was killed, and Max killed the man who did it.

“It felt like.” This is tough territory for him, the kind of thing that leaves him pale and shivery, the kind of thing she’s normally careful with him through. Today, they don’t have the luxury. “It felt like the only thing that I could possibly do.”

Furiosa watches him, as Max watches the window. There’s a bird outside, maybe a mynah, she can’t look to try to tell.

What in God’s name is she going to do?

“I think I need to spend the night alone.” Furiosa says, pleased with how perfectly level and reasonable the words come out. Only, then she just about feels her resolve buckle when Max flinches. “I’d like you to leave now.”

He doesn’t complain. God knows what she might have done if he had, caved probably. He slips to his feet and goes, and leaves her to shut the lights out, climb to her room, and lie in the dark. Details of torture. After all these years, after everything she has seen, could it be possible that she had finally decided to put her trust in someone, and that he has turned out to be the wrong person?

Probably not. Probably not. But Max is telling her that maybe, yes, that there is a chance that yes, after this she will not love him anymore, and the horrible, sick catch twenty two of it is that she _believes_ him about that, because she fucking trusts him.

\---

It is three in the morning. _KGB hour,_ mum used to call it, prime time for home invasions and for raids, everyone’s asleep and at their most disoriented. She hears the banging on her door. Rictus would probably have liked to have broken in and found her in bed, but she is down on the couch in her pyjamas, curled up and very awake the dark. She answers the door by the second knock.

If she takes the wind out of his sails, she’s too dazed to pick up on it in the dark. He just puts her against the door and handcuffs her, hard (and badly, Max has shown her) and drags her down to where his car is parked, asking her questions all the way.


	11. arson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: violence, flashbacks, discussion of murder and graphic upsetting details.

It’s only just dark, and Max is walking home, trying to ignore the cold fingers of panic tracing down his spine, when Rictus makes his move. The car is parked in front of his house, with the back door already open.

“Constable Rockatansky, I’d like you to come with me for questioning.” He says, eyes glinting with malice. This is it, this is official, and Max is too tired to even argue, settles obediently into the back of the car.

The local police station is an hour or so away, and as much as Max would like to pass the time in silence, Rictus has other ideas.

“So, why did you settle up in this neck of the woods?”

“Job offer.”

Max murmurs, watching the sand go by out the window.

“Slinging coffee?”

“I like coffee.”

“Jesus, the two of you are quite a pair.” Rictus gripes, and Max tries to force down the thought of that, of her sitting there, looking at him with dawning and terrible comprehension. He drops his head back against the seat, folds his arms over his chest, and lets out a sigh. The kind of sigh that suggests that this is a tremendous waste of his time, but that he will elect to tolerate it.

Max stays quiet, until he’s being hustled through the station- and that’s a vivid memory and a half. Police stations look the same all across Australia, as far as he can tell. Maybe all around the world. The same desks, the same glass windows the same little, concrete, fluorescent lit rooms with their metal legged tables.

Max drops into the seat in there when Rictus pushes him to it, and sits back with a sigh, glancing around the space to try to spot the camera.

“Sit down.” Rictus tells him, and Max drops carefully, casually into the seat, as much as his knee will allow.

“So, Max.” Rictus says, sitting on the edge of the table, all up and looming over him, “Tell me about the work you used to do investigating organized crime?”

\---

“Where were you the night that Johnny was killed?”

“What do you know about the car he was found attached to?”

“The accident that came before that, the one that cost you that leg- you were angry about that too, weren’t you?”

The interrogation goes slowly. Mostly because Max refuses to say a word. Rictus is talking, but Max is thinking.

Max is thinking about what he’s asked, about organized crime.

Organized crime _is_ a problem in Australia. Sure, it’s a safe country, with a homicide rate that has held steady at a very low two hundred and fifty murders a year for the last little while, down since the spike to the three hundred and seventies when he was last on the job. But there are gangs here; the good old HA have a considerable presence, as do the Bandidos, and the Serbians have been moving in hard the last little while. People move money, move drugs, move guns, move humans- the problems of the rest of the world are here. Every single one of them is investigated and dealt with by the AFP.

So yeah, Max never got _near_ official organized crime investigations, because he was State, and those are Australian Federal Police territory. Rictus should know that better than anyone. Max got involved with Toecutter Joe’s outlaw biker gang initially thanks to some traffic violations- an attempted stop and search turning into a drugs bust, a high speed chase. 

Is it really possible that Rictus discovered the file on Johnny on a poke through some of the cold cases, took an interest, and tracked Max down out here after the call? That had been his initial thought, but he’s reevaluating it pretty hard and fast. 

The thing is, Rictus is decidedly crooked- Max knows deep in his gut that this guy doesn’t care that Max didn’t play by the rules, this guy isn’t in it for the passion of a job done right. There are crusaders in the force for police accountability, officers that think that just wearing a badge shouldn’t be license to break the law. Max has a lot of respect for them- would have considered himself to be tentatively among their ranks, _until._ He sometimes shudders to think what the best of them would say to him now.

But one thing is clear; that is not Rictus, not in the slightest. And if Rictus isn’t in this for the pursuit of justice, he is in it for himself, and Max just has to see how.

The voice mail. The emergency call. It hits Max, all at once, that the best possible reason a person could have to bother to listen to a call like that, was if they were investigating, in some way, the case of Immortan Joe.

No, not even that- he and Furiosa had never given up anything that would link Joe to that call. It should not have raised a single red flag, not unless someone was searching police data bases for mentions of a Max Rockatansky, which- why should they be? The only people not accounted for who knew that the call was made, and that an emergency dial out from that time, that night, from Citadel was something worth paying attention to, would be _Joe’s people._

More specifically, Joe’s people on the force. After the assault, Joe may very well have had an officer listening in, ready to squash anything if Furiosa tried to press charges against him, probably- possibly getting ready to make her disappear if she tried. Of course he fucking had. Max feels a sick swoop in his stomach, a little like driving past an obstacle in the night, just inches away from a terrible collision, without realizing it until it shows up in your rearview.

She hadn’t, but the name _Max Rockatansky_ would have showed up, all over the case notes, _Constable_ Max Rockatansky, and Joe’s man on the inside- Rictus, Max can absolutely assume that this theoretical person is Rictus, had been surprised at the name, and cursorily done his own searches and _then_ turned up the Johnny story.

Instead of a good cop going from cold case file, to call, to Citadel, they have a bad cop going from Citadel, to call, to cold case file.

The implications of this leave him staggering. 

“You know full well that I have never been involved in the investigation of organized crime.” Max says, all at once, startling Rictus out of a slow ramble. “I was involved in the arrests that lead to your successful prosecution and take down of key members of Toecutter Joe’s boys. I lost my family for it.”

“And that made you angry?”

It’s the most easy, the most asinine question he’s maybe ever been asked, and he lets himself lose his temper and snarl, for just a heartbeat. Controls himself;

“I didn’t shed any tears when I heard how Johnny died, if that’s what you mean.”

It isn’t. They both know it isn’t. But now, Max is wondering frantically, what exactly is he looking for, here? Is this about him, Max, or is it about Furiosa after all? What admission gets this guy turned around and sent back to the people in charge without what he wants- or thinking that his job here is done? This might make the difference between Immortan Joe’s boys turning up again or not. It might make the difference between a quiet spring and summer, and a bullet in the head sometime in the next few weeks.

“And how did you end up here? In Citadel? Defending mechanics against bad guys?”

“Nothing. Seven years of nothing. Temp work, oil tanker, construction, labour, job posting in the paper.”

He’s so shocked he finds himself being truthful, because he can see how it looks now to them- him there, those deaths, him here now- could be a real problem.

“And you never told the girl any of this?”

“No. We weren’t- she didn’t want to know.”

But of course, Rictus doesn’t believe that. Max wouldn’t either, if he were still a cop- even a crooked one. So he explains;

“I didn’t want her to know, in case she was brought in to a room like this. Look, whether or not you think I killed Johnny, you can sure fucking appreciate the idea of someone wanting to walk away from anything to do with the gangs, can’t you?”

Let that be the point that he drives home. He’s out, he’s uninvolved, he’s not going to call anyone, to say anything, to follow any leads. He wants to walk away.

“It. This. It was pure coincidence, and not one I’m too happy about.” He drives him again, low and serious. “It’s been seven years, I managed to stay away from this kind of thing, and I could happily have it be seventy.”

Mentioning Joe now would be a mistake, because he doesn’t want to let on- and especially doesn’t want to corner Rictus on camera, doesn’t want it stated, or even _implied_ , that Max thinks that Rictus is on any kind of take here.

Max stays quiet, while Rictus waits. Max doesn’t know for sure if he’s hoping the silence will provoke a flood of information, or if he just doesn’t know what his next question should be.

“I’ll leave you to think this over for a minute,” Rictus says, and yes, yes- he is going to go make a phone call, Max thinks, probably to the brains of this little operation, “you can just sit here for a little while longer and wait.”

He leaves, and locks the door behind him, and all Max’s breath leaves his chest in a rush.

\---

They’re edging up on midnight now, and the station is empty, but for the desk clerk who Max passed on his way in with Rictus. He won’t be of any help- even faking a medical emergency from back in here wouldn’t be dramatic enough to attract his attention.

Max paces the room, instead, and continues to try to think.

\---

It’s around four in the morning when the door clatters back open, and Rictus pushes into the room with a struggling, white-faced Furiosa. Three am arrest, Max figures for the travel time, she’s in the soft cotton drawstring shorts she uses as pyjamas, and a brown tank top. She looks wide awake, though, with any luck he found her up and kicking, likely dealing with insomnia.

Likely because of him.

But, it eases something in him, when she looks at him now, and he sees some of the tension bleed out of her, like his mere presence is enough to make the situation a little more all right. Not just, he likes to think, because now she has a witness in the room.

Rictus shoves her down into the chair on the opposite side of the table, and gestures for Max to offer out his hands- he wasn’t cuffed before, but is going to be now, apparently. His go in his lap, rather than behind him, which makes it easier for him to sit, at least. Furiosa is on the edge of her seat, wrists still pinned behind her, between her and the chair back. Rictus makes no move, of course, to offer to help.

Max swallows, wets his lips, and then takes a gamble. Asks;

“Are you still angry with me?”

The room goes very quiet.

Rictus is listening, will listen and decide what to make of this. Furiosa is listening too, and watching him, with narrow eyes and a heaving chest from the struggle into the station. Is she angry with him?

No, she never was, not really, and they both know it.

“Yes.” She says, instead, eyes very narrow. “Fuck off, Rockatansky.”

He hasn’t given her enough to go on to get any further with this than that, but it’s enough to make Rictus grin, from the doorway, and the energy in the room shift. He feels it. She does too.

She meets his eyes over the table, and he sees understanding, underneath a thin parody of fear and scorn, and Max knows that all details of torture aside, they’re in it together.

\---

“Now, you two really aren’t very honest with one another, are you?” Rictus asks, with his back against the wall, and a hand full of files. Max and Furiosa are both still at the table, watching one another over the empty space. He looks flat, she looks bored.

“For example. Miss Imperatore here apparently doesn’t know about- would you like to be the one to tell her, Constable Rockatansky?”

Max stays quiet, just pushes his toe against the ground and rocks his chair up onto the back legs, all casual, as he listens, and watches Furiosa.

She’s a formidable woman. He’s known that since the moment she first stared him down, but he sees it even more now, as she sits here, tired, cuffed, and poised- she’s the kind of suspect he would never even have tried to crack, not expecting any kind of result. He wonders how the hell Rictus has missed the fact that she’s iron, forge-tempered and more unbendable than either of them.

“Two people are dating, the way I see it, they both have a right to know when one of them is married with a kid.”

There it is. Her gaze slips to Rictus, in shock, and then back to Max, searching his face for confirmation, eyes wide, mouth dropping slightly open as she sucks in a breath. Max shuts his eyes and puts his chair back down on the ground, four legs, and tries not to fold in on himself.

He should have talked to her about Sprog before now. He should have. But even mentioning Jessie had been bad enough. Sprog was. Sprog was-

“Dead, of course.” Rictus continues, smiling, now that he’s scored real blood. He can taste it. Max can hear that, even over the rushing in his ears, even without opening his eyes back up.

“Run down by a gang he was investigating. The boy died instantly. Jessie Rockatansky made it a few months after that, but died on the operating table when they were trying to put her-”

“Shut the _fuck_ up, Rictus.” Furiosa snarls, and Max snaps out of it, out of a memory thick with the scent of antiseptic and beeping machines, and Jessie not having a hand left for him to hold. He opens his eyes wide and looks at Furiosa over the table, and she stares back, solid, steady, full of her wild anger and courage. She can’t get any closer to him than this, but she is here, and she wants him to know it.

“I guess you do get the picture.” Rictus agrees, closing the file, and opening the next one. “And you can see why he wasn’t prosecuted, for what happened afterwards. Chasing that boy down, killing him like he did.”

“I’d have done it.” Furiosa agrees, still watching Max. He knows she doesn’t mean just this. This is everything they’ve talked about tonight, everything they talked about the night she decided not to go after Immortan Joe. “If it were my kid? I’d have done it. I’d have done _anything.”_

“Max Rockatansky,” Rictus says, even and mean, “chased Johnny ‘the Boy’ Montgommery off the road in his car, then dragged him out of the wreck. He handcuffed him by the ankle to the frame, and from what we can piece together- handed him a _handsaw_ to try to cut himself out before the thing went up in a ball of fire. Johnny died, burned to death, while attempting to saw through his own ankle.”

There it is. Out loud. Max realizes he’s never actually heard the words before. He thinks it through, abstractly, imagines sitting in the room with the profiler making sense of what they found at the scene- imagines the conclusions he’d come to, _sadist, psychopath, needs to be put away in a dark hole for a long, long time._

Furiosa cringes, and holds her amputated arm a tiny bit closer to her body.

Max shuts his eyes again.

“Now what I don’t get,” Rictus says, “is why Johnny? Yeah, we all know why the homicide happened. If it were me, I think I would have gone after the whole gang, and done them one by one, a shallow grave at a time. But the rest of old Toecutter’s boys, they survived you. They were near all wiped out a few years later, in a turf war with the Serbs, but you were long gone by then. So what was it about Johnny?”

What was it about Johnny? Well, it might have had something to do with his laughter. Max had dealt with the little shit before, or a number of other calls. Petty theft and mischief at first, then domestic violence, road safety- and finally into the homicides in his last few years on the force. Johnny had been a smug little psychopath, a shit-eating grin on his face, even- especially- when standing there covered in the blood of his victims. That thing with the girl on the chain was one of the worst sexual assaults he’d ever responded to.

The truth is, it had been pure happenstance. It was an accident, running into him, that night of all nights. The night that Jessie went in to an operation that was supposed to bring her one step closer to consciousness, the night a doctor came out to the waiting room instead, with a grim look on his face that had taken Max’s legs out from under him, even at thirty paces.

The sensation he’d had that night, an intense rushing in his head, a loss of all sound, comes back to him now in full force. Rictus is still talking, but Max only hears train station, wind, pressure, and even though he can see the shapes Rictus’s mouth makes, can see that he is getting angry now, he can’t hear any of it.

Rictus slaps the table, hard and sudden and in Max’s face, and Furiosa jumps in her chair- she’s talking too, and Max just-

Johnny had been there, the side of the road, laughing his smug fucking laugh, like somehow he’d known, someone had told him, and had yelped and jumped in the car when Max lunged for him. Had driven off fast.

It had been nothing, nothing at all, for an academy trained high speed driver to get behind his own wheel and give chase. Even the head start hadn’t made the slightest bit of difference to a driver like Max.

Pain interrupts the memory, blinding and real and horrible, and very in the here and now. 

Max _shouts,_ and the real world crashes back in. Furiosa is on her feet, screaming, trying to get over the table to him, and his knee, his bad knee, is in agony, hurting so badly that Max doubles over, nearly retching, trying to work out what just happened. He hears Furiosa hit the wall, sees from the corner of his eye that Rictus is on top of her, and that she’s fighting him, hard, even with her arms bound, voice raised in an angry, protective snarl- 

Rictus had hit him in the bad knee, mistaking- whatever that was, his period of silence- for stoicism, and now a handcuffed Furiosa is trying to rip him apart with just her teeth. Max sucks in an anguished breath and says, as authoritatively as he can muster, while his knee is still on fire;

_“Stop.”_

Both of them do. Furiosa, tentatively, and Rictus suspiciously, looking back over his shoulder at Max, then following his gaze up to the corner. Up to the camera.

He swears, and takes Furiosa by the shoulder, shoving her back into her chair so hard she nearly goes over backwards with it, and points at Max, lets him know;

“We’re not finished.”

Then storms out the door.

\---

Rictus leaves them alone for a little while after that.

Of course, they’re not really alone. There’s the video camera. There’s the two way glass up on the wall. Max thinks it’s probably around five am by now, but it’s impossible to tell without any windows, with no natural light creeping in under the door.

Furiosa, he sees, looks a tiny bit like she’s in shock. It isn’t as though he can blame her.

“Where did he pick you up?” Max asks, more for the sake of hearing her voice than anything else.

“My place.” She answers, looking back over at him, and he isn’t sure what it is he’s reading in her expression. “And late, too, I’m not even wearing a fucking bra.”

She isn’t- he’d noticed, but had been trying not to think about it, because he guesses that it’s hitting him harder than it’s hitting her- but he doesn’t like feeling that Rictus is trying to make her vulnerable. Even just the thought of it now... Max’s head feels light again, gone, floating. 

He remembers of Dag, in the garden. Slowly, carefully, he curls his toes in his boots, shifts his feet, feeling very deliberately, searching out the exact places where he meets the floor. His body comes back together, in terribly slow increments. He will not lose himself. 

“Were you trying to headbutt him?” He asks, to keep himself talking, keep her talking too, “You looked determined to break his nose.”

It provokes the smile he’d hoped it would, all teeth, all _I should be so lucky._ Hopelessly reassured, but still a little dizzy with all of it, he searches and fails to think of what he should say next.

“Max,” Furiosa says, drawing him the rest of the way back into himself, with just a whisper. The microphones may be good enough to pick it up, may not, “I’ve been thinking about something you said. A while ago now, I guess. And I wanted to tell you that I’m—that I still trust you. I have for a long time now.”

She means she loves him, and he knows he loves her too, and it makes all the difference. He’s- okay. Not perfect, not even feeling easy, but okay- if they can get through the night together then she is going to still be here in the morning.

Max breathes, and nods, because yeah. 

“Me too.”

Now they’ve just got to get through it.


	12. definitely arson

Furiosa has come to terms with the fact that she missed her chance with Immortan Joe. On most days she is a logical and cool-headed person, enough so that she can recognize that this is a good thing, was the right choice to make, and that she will not regret it in the long run. It is ultimately a good thing that her record is unblemished, in terms of her never having killed anyone.

So, she knows what she’s feeling right now will pass, but all the same- after hearing the way Max screamed when Rictus kicked him in that kneecap, she could _happily_ murder the detective. Happily.

It wasn’t even the scream, so much as watching Rictus’s face while Max was screaming.

Camera, handcuffs and all, she had _lunged_ for him, totally unsure of what she was going to do when she got there, except put herself bodily between him and Max. Her instincts had been saying _bite out his fucking jugular,_ which now seems tremendously ambitious.

He’d swatted her aside, thrown her into the wall, and pinned her, still snarling, with an ease that made her sick to think about.

Now that he’s gone, now that it’s just her and Max, she can feel the adrenaline starting to really get to her. She’s been up all night, and it’s probably well past dawn now- Max would probably know, his sense of time is infinitely more developed than hers. She considers asking.

Max is sitting in his chair, look straight ahead at the wall. She can see him trying, feel him reach for her now and again, with a lean forwards, with a few words, but she knows him, and knows that this is a trip down memory lane well beyond what he can handle even when they’re alone together.

A kid. Jesus, she can’t blame him.

“How long is he allowed to hold us? Twenty four hours?”

She wonders to him, quietly, because everything she really knows about police is from the womyn (who mostly dealt with them during the seventies,) or from when she was arrested as a preteen, and from the US and Canada. It’s hard to keep all of it straight.

“Depends.” Max answers, unhelpfully, drawing in a breath, and letting it out again, and she knows he isn’t being deliberately obtuse, that this is just all he has right now. Depends on what, though?

She doesn’t press, just uses her instep to draw her chair in, closer to his, closer to the table, and leans forward to look him in the eye. He meets her gaze.

“You know, you’re lucky I met you when I did. There was a time if I found out you’d worked for the fuzz, I’d have keyed your car.”

She’s making it up, and he knows it, but she likes the way it makes his eyes focus on hers, the thoughtfulness coming back into his expression.

“And you’re even more lucky I didn’t meet you when we were in highschool. I’d have stuffed you in a locker and stolen your lunch money.”

Max actually manages a teeny, tiny uptick of a smile.

That, of course, is when Rictus walks in. Furiosa lets out a breath and sits back in her seat, rolling her eyes when he grins at her.

His expression seems to say; _your turn._

\---

“It’s weird. It strikes me as strange, Rockatansky, given everything, that you’d end up hooking up with a woman with ties to a biker gang?”

Max looks up, and Furiosa is extremely pleased to see that he is doing a little better, because he communicates with his expression that that is an incredibly stupid question, and that Rictus is a moron for asking. That hadn’t even occurred to her, but she’s pleased to see that it’s a non-issue, given the withering glance Max spares their detective.

“And a criminal. This record is technically sealed, but I’m sure she must have talked to you about it.”

No, she hasn’t, but Furiosa finds herself rolling her eyes, as well.

“See, maybe you are right for each other. She’s like you. She wheedled her way out of a conviction.”

“Because I was _thirteen._ ” Furiosa interjects, at this point. “Which, you may recall, is below the age of criminal responsibility.”

“Not always.” Which is true. Australia’s courts will never try anyone under the age of ten, but ten to fourteen year olds may or may not face trial, depending on whether the prosecution can adequately demonstrate whether the child in question knows the difference between right and wrong.

Max knows all this, she’s sure, so she spoils it for him, before Rictus can get to it.

“Not criminally responsible, but they handed mum a few mandates around my care and control, which she promptly ignored. I had a court-appointed supervisor assigned my case, and it ended with custody being transferred to my father.”

The one who’d moved her to Canada.

“Which is a pretty light sentence, if you ask me, given the crime. What’s the section on arson where you’re from, Rockatansky?”

“461.” Max answers, giving her a look that is frankly, a little more appraising than horrified. “Wilfully and unlawfully setting fire to building or structure, vessel, fuel, cultivated vegetable produce, mine, aircraft or motor vehicle.” 

Even though it’s clearly rote memory, which she knows is the easiest thing to tune into at times like these, it’s good to hear him talking.

“That's fourteen years.” Rictus says, with a sneer.

“Life, for an adult,” Max corrects him, absently, “fourteen years for deliberately but unlawfully set crop and bushfires, life for actual arson. But it’s just outcome plans and conferencing for a juvenile offender, even if she had been found liable. What did you set fire to?”

“A billboard.” Furiosa says, and is shocked to find her face getting a little warm. “A really, really offensive one.” This is the strangest moment in her life to rediscover an ability to flush. “I still can’t believe I got caught.”

Max grins at her, quick and totally helpless, and Furiosa has pretty much been in love with him for ages, but _knows_ it, now, by the shape of that grin on his face. He leans in, puts his elbows on the table, handcuffed hands resting between them, but easy and lax, as though they’re sharing secrets over a dinner table. She finds herself leaning in, too.

Sensing control slipping away from him, Rictus slaps the file down on the table between them, and Furiosa pulls back with a tiny, startled laugh.

\---

He separates them, after that. She’d probably do the same thing, if it was her. Rictus tries to get just a couple of more questions in, then when he can’t get them to even break eyecontact, grabs her by her shoulder, again, and drags her to her feet. Furiosa gasps, and lets herself be hauled one room down, to a second interrogation chamber, and shoved inside.

As they go through the hall she becomes aware, slowly, that there are other people in the station. She gets a brief glimpse of a woman’s face watching, before she’s through the door and it’s locked behind her.

This room is obviously the less serious version of the one she’d been in. It has a window, and lacks the double sided mirror from the last one.

She’s alone in there for about five minutes, before someone opens the door. It’s a middle aged woman, with dark skin and hair that Furiosa thinks is prematurely white. She looks over Furiosa pityingly, and steps in, file in hand.

“Detective Rictus sent me in to take your statement.”

Furiosa stays standing, pointedly ignoring the chairs.

“Yeah? What statement could he possibly fucking want me to give?”

People use female police officers to try to disarm her aggression a lot of the time. It hasn’t worked on her since she was a kid, though admittedly she does feel slightly less likely to have her nose or jaw broken if she gets too mouthy.

“An innocent arrestee? That’s a surprise. We don’t get too many of those in here.” Unlike Rictus, this woman knows how to bite back, has a tone appropriately wry and dry. Furiosa’s mouth twitches in a slightly unbidden smile. “Maybe you could start with where you were the night it all happened?”

The woman shuts the door behind her, and moves towards her. Furiosa backs up, at first, but she’s holding what looks like a key to the cuffs, and holding it up like she wants to unlock them, so Furiosa turns around, gingerly, offering her wrists. She’s been dragged around by them so much tonight, it’s a significant relief to let her arms down, to readjust her prosthesis. She glances up at the officer, who’s still in plainclothes this time of the morning- a brown blouse and khaki pants. Businesslike. Mature.

“I’m not in here for a crime. As far as I’m aware, I’m not charged with anything. Originally, _I_ called the police to deal with an assault, and this asshole is the one who shows up.”

“Furiosa Imperatore.” The woman recalls, and opens the file in front of her, angling it carefully, so Furiosa couldn’t look if she were tempted to. “You’re the only assault we’ve had in Citadel in the last few years, you know that? You guys don’t even have a bar, so there aren’t any parking lot fights. Normally we just end up out there for the insurance fires.”

“Well, when the reporting process is so _smooth,_ it’s a wonder more people don’t come forward.”

Furiosa murmurs, teeth gritting, still rubbing the life back into her wrist. But something has changed about the way the woman is looking at her. She looks shrewd, now, bigger and taller than she stands. White hair up in a sleek twist, dark eyes lively in her face.

“Ms Imperatore, I think I’d like to bring you into my office and get the whole story from the beginning, if you don’t mind.”

It’s an order, not a question, but something about the glint in her eye makes Furiosa privately sure that Rictus has, in fact, _not_ sent this person in to take down her statement.

Seeing the assessment on Furiosa’s face, the woman shows her the inside of her file- blank. Empty.

“I don’t talk to cops, as a rule.” Furiosa says, even though she’s already considering it, already has her foot halfway out the door. “Especially not ones who come in trying to play me.”

“I know.” The police officer answers, but reaches out and holds the door open for her anyways, waiting until Furiosa gives in to curiosity and goes on through it.

She only catches a quick flash of the plate on the woman’s door before she goes in, but catches the words _Sergeant_ , something, and then _Entity,_ which she gathers is some part of rank and name- and more from the size of the office and the slant of the woman’s shoulders, Furiosa decides that this is the biggest fish there is in the small pond of this little station. She is in charge.

Entity is also apparently unhappy, because she gestures for Furiosa to sit down, then falls into her own chair, and asks;

“Now tell me what this shit Rictus is really doing in my town. There’s rules to be followed, here, and we both know he’s breaking them.”

Furiosa sits, and gives her a single, _long_ stare.

“There’s a bottle of whiskey in the top of the desk if that’d make this easier.” Entity says, even though the clock on her desk makes it just before six in the morning. Furiosa’s eyebrows lift, and Entity shifts forward, puts her elbows on the desk. “But you want a few of my cards on the table? All right. I checked you out. When he pulled your records, he used our systems to do it, so hampering an investigation be damned, I called around on you.”

This isn’t decreasing her misgivings in the slightest, except then, Entity says;

“A woman I trust said if you were a target, that it wasn’t good news. As I put it together, your address looks awful close to one in Citadel that I keep an eye on for a fine young lady on a real nice motorcycle.”

That, _that_ changes everything. Furiosa leans forward, and puts her elbows on the table, so they’re bent head to head, so she can meet Entity’s wicked, dark eyes.

“You take one of your men and you put him behind that one way glass. Watch them. Rictus already took a swing at him once tonight, he could easily do him serious damage, and if that happens, all bets are fucking off.”

It’s a hell of a demand to make, and a hell of a tone to make it in, but Entity stares back at her for a few shrewd seconds, gets to her feet and goes to the door, whistles for one of her officers and gives him some murmured directions. Furiosa watches him slink through the main room and down the hall, to go keep an eye on Rictus and Max.

When Entity has sat back down, Furiosa leans back in her seat, and says;

“What can I give you that’ll help you get this guy the hell out of town?”

“Give me everything you’ve got.” Entity answers.

And Furiosa gives.

Her first ever voluntary police statement is long, but to the point. She systematically lays out every interaction the two of them have had, in curse, curt terms- beginning from that first tailgating session, to the wait in the parking lot, to the tickets, to seeing him through her window, to Toast and Capable crying in her car, to being barged in on at three am this morning. Entity doesn’t write a note of it down, but Furiosa gets the sense that she really doesn’t need to. The woman is charismatic, high ranked, and clearly has a steel trap for a mind.

She wonders in the end if this is how confessional feels.

“Well,” says Entity, when it’s over, “all I can say is call the cops _sooner,_ woman.”

Furiosa snorts, because that’s not going to happen, and finds herself raising her eyebrows when Entity plucks a card off her desk, and offers it over.

“Direct line.” She promises, warmly. “For next time, just in case. But right now, let’s go see to this Max character, shall we?”

\---

The showdown between Entity and Rictus is probably glorious, but honestly, Furiosa is barely listening to a word of it. 

When they come out of the office, it’s in time to hear a muffled sound that is certainly a yell, Max’s yell, and to see the officer assigned to go watch through the window bursting out of the side chamber, then wheeling into the interrogation room in a hell of a hurry. Entity starts running, and Furiosa is there a stunned second behind.

When she arrives, Rictus is being pulled back, and Max is doubled over his bad knee. Furiosa doesn’t need to be able to see his face to know that it’s bad.

“You stupid _fuck-_ ” Furiosa starts to snarl, whirling on Rictus, but there are two police officers between her and him, and one of them is Entity, one palm up in Furiosa’s face, other hand going to her gun.

“Sit down. _Sit._ Check on him. Right now. Rictus, you just stand there, before I put a bullet in your ass.”

Furiosa goes to Max, who manages to straighten up and clutch her hand. She doesn’t ask if he’s okay, because he’s clearly not, but she does stay close to him, maybe hovering just a little, there for comfort.

The conversation that followed, Max will relay to her later, involved a fair amount of posturing about jurisdiction, interference in a murder investigation, and the like, followed by Entity pointing out that it was _her_ town and _her_ ongoing assault case, and he was on record intimidating her victim and now on camera assaulting her witness, and would Max like to go into another room to discuss pressing charges, or perhaps a lawsuit?

The reason Furiosa is missing all this is exactly to do with that assault. She can see Max trying to move his knee, but the leg won’t lift under its’ own power. He reaches, with both hands, gently extending the calf, and bites back a sound pained enough that she decides, cutting the whole thing off;

“Hospital. Now. By ambulance. Call whoever you need to call.”

Entity looks at her young officer and nods, and he leaves the room in a hurry. Rictus is looking worried, now, and keeping his mouth shut, which is good, because it means Furiosa doesn’t give in and leap across the space to try to choke him to death.

“You’d better start praying, Eric.” Entity advises. “And you can start right now, on the car ride all the way home.”

\---

It’ll be a half hour before an ambulance can make it out to them, so they end up in a police car on the way to the hospital after all, with Max and his leg stretched out in the back seat, Furiosa sitting in the front, looking over her shoulder, and Entity driving. She puts the lights on whenever traffic threatens to slow them down, and keeps Max talking, while Furiosa is too choked up to manage it.

It’s cop talk, mostly, _you ever worked with_ and _you must have known,_ even one _you guys had that case where_ that turns into a long story involving a lot of cocaine and several dozen hyper-aggressive iguanas, and Furiosa wants to scream at the both of them to take this more seriously, but recognizes that this is entirely her problem.

“What was he after you for, anyway?” Entity asks, as she blows through a red light with easy practice. Max, apparently responding to something in her that Furiosa had as well, just outs with it; 

“Vengeance. Madness.”

“Ah,” says Entity, knowingly, glancing at Max, and then Furiosa, who feels the fiercely protective thing in her stomach coil tighter, “that’ll happen, won’t it? Best nothing more be said about it than that.”

“Except,” Max says, from the back, eyes closed, “I think that Rictus may be involved in some way with Immortan Joe’s old followers. I think this was about Furiosa, as much as it was me. If this has scared him off--”

“It has,” promises Entity, and Max nods, apparently prepared to take her at her word.

“Then Rictus goes back and says we never went to the police about any of it. Which we didn’t.” He says, cracking an eyelid and shooting a look at Entity, who nods, twists a key over her mouth, and mimes tossing it out the drivers side window.

She pulls up out front, and heads for indoors, presumably for an attendant or two, leaving Furiosa to climb out and open the back seat door, to try to support Max’s leg as much as possible while he extends it slowly out of the car, and scoots gently out after it. Even just that hurts enough that the blood drains back out of his face. Furiosa grits her teeth and helps him through it, and up- when to her relief, Entity appears with a strapping young nurse and a wheelchair. Apparently being assaulted by and showing up with police officers grant you queue jumping privileges.

Max is apparently hurting badly enough that he sits down without complaint, and is wheeled on in to be taken through. Furiosa follows, and blows right past the first orderly that tries to hold her back, but is stopped by the second.

“It’ll be fine.” Max tells her, over his shoulder. “I’ll see you as soon as they let me.”

And then they have him around a corner and out of sight, and Furiosa is left standing there, in the hospital in her pyjamas and a pair of flip flops, with a red, raw feeling in her chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight tweak to the chapter length- now aiming at thirteen full chapters and one short epilogue.


	13. union

Max isn’t discharged from the hospital for about another twelve hours. By then they’re both so tired that they don’t realize that it was Rictus and then Entity who got them out this, far and that they have no car, no wallets, no change and no way to call home. Furiosa begs the use of the front desk phone, and they sit on the uncomfortable waiting room chairs together while Ms Brown drives out to come pick them up. She has Dag with her, who looks worried, and angry and scared. She mostly seems to be a placeholder in the front seat so it isn’t awkward for Furiosa to crawl into the back with Max, who’s blinking through the fog of some shockingly effective narcotics and as taciturn as ever.

She unloads the approximate story of their evening, leaving out the past commission of any and all crimes, hers or his, and accepts their help in getting Max and his braced up knee and somewhat loopy balance out of the car and into his house- he lives in a bungalow, she has a two story, so his is the natural choice- and into his bed.

“I’m bringing breakfast over in the morning,” Ms Brown tells her, giving the top of her head a pat, “and a few casseroles you can just pop in when you need. I’ll send one of the girls by to do the dishes, too.”

“Thanks,” says Furiosa, wearily, already falling back against the pillows next to Max, though she should really get up to show them out-

They forgive her silently, and leave quietly, and she is asleep, tucked under Max’s arm and in against his side, in almost a heartbeat.

\---

“Valkyrie called,” Ms Brown says, that morning, in front of the both of them. Furiosa sucks her bottom lip in, but then looks at Max- and really, he’s fine, they all know it, and he’s a part of this now-

“She says that this trouble you’ve been having? It’s over. Rictus won’t be back on your tail, in exchange for nothing ever coming of this lawsuit. The guy who sent them, Corpus something or other?”

Max lets out a small grunt of recognition at the name, and casts her a thankful look as she sets two plates down on the table, each heaping with food.

“Well, he’s over, too. There’ll be news in the paper tomorrow, but you two can sleep well tonight.”

She leaves, and they sit together, bent over the table with their heads close.

“God, I was mad.” She says, eventually. “I could have killed him. He could have killed you.”

“Fatal blow to the knee.” Max agrees, placidly, and bites his lip when she shoots a pointed glance at him. It might not make sense, no, but it’s not really what she’s reacting to. So, he touches his good leg to hers under the table.

“So.” Furiosa says, when they’ve finished eating, and he’s done talking her through making them each a cup of coffee- still not as good as his coffee, but better than what she normally manages. “You think he had something to do with Joe.”

“It’s possible.” Max admits. “It’s normal for a man like Joe to have some help from inside law enforcement. If Rictus was set on us right after the fight at the garage, then Joe would have been alive to give the order then. It’s perverse, but it’s most likely that no one had the guts to realize and call it off.”

“Sure,” Furiosa agrees, “but a detective? I mean someone of that rank?”

“Easily. I’d like to talk to Valkyrie about why she thinks she’s taken care of it, to be honest.”

“And you?”

“Well, I did kill a noted member of another gang. It’s even feasible that Toecutter had ties to Joe. If it looked to them like I did that there, and then turned up to cause trouble here...”

“They’d have wanted to ask questions.” Furiosa agrees, with a nod of comprehension.

“At the very least.”

It still leaves a lot unanswered.

“I’d like to talk to Valkyrie,” Max says again, more carefully, to make sure she knows he means it, and this time she looks up at him, and nods.

She’ll make it happen.

\---

“Max,” Nux says, when he hears the rest of it, later. Max is going to take the week off work for the sake of his knee, and probably more later, after he’s had surgery, so right now they’re out on Max’s porch. Furiosa is at her shop, trying to cram something like a week’s work into one day.

“Why didn’t I tell you?” Max asks, watching the street out front, absently.

“No, I’m used to that, you never tell me anything,” Nux says, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. Max finds himself smiling. “Why didn’t- I don’t know. I don’t know what I mean.” Then; “What was his name?”

“Sprog.” Max says, eyes burning. “We called him Sprog.”

“We’re having a girl,” Nux admits, and Max thinks he hears an _otherwise_ in there that he’s glad he won’t have to deal with, because he doesn’t know if he could stand another baby with that name in his arms. 

“You’re never going to stop being scared.” He warns Nux, creakily. “From the first breath she takes, you’ll be scared something is going to happen to her. You’ll know, her getting hurt, it’s the worst thing that could ever possibly happen- and you’ll be right. It is.”

Nux nods, and sits back in his seat, looking appropriately awed, and afraid, and eager.

“But you’ll be a good dad.” Max promises. “Anyone can see that.”

“Thanks,” says Nux, “and if you want to, you’re going to be a pretty cool Uncle Max.”

\---

When Max counts, there are an awful lot of things Furiosa still has never told him. He doesn’t know what happened between her and her father. He doesn’t know what her mother died of. She doesn’t know the exact story behind her middle adolescence in Canada and the move to the States. He doesn’t know how she lost her arm.

He does know a few more important things. He knows she will kick his ass into actually going through with this surgery that the doctors are recommending, and that she’s going to be there to drive him to and from physio in the weeks that follow. He knows where her spare key is hidden. He knows where she’s going to take her next vacation, and with who. Max already has more of her than any man, than any _one_ has had in years. He’s humbled by that.

Later in the week, when he’s not so well he can walk easily or far, but well enough to drive his car, he swings by her place to pick her and her duffel bag up. Furiosa has been staying with him every night since it all happened, and needs some tools, some clothes- probably more the former than the latter, knowing her. Tonight Capable has borrowed the car for work, and she’s bringing a little too much over to comfortably bike with, so he’s happy to stretch his legs and get out of the house for a bit, even if it’s just to pick up Furiosa and her stuff. He’s only expecting a short visit.

Max realizes that there are far too many bikes in Furiosa’s drive before he even pulls into the lane.

The front door is open, and the house inside is lit with the soft, orange light of fire and candles, and a lamp somewhere deep in the kitchen. He can hear the sounds of women laughing, talking, some quietly, some raucously. Music pours out of one of the second story windows.

Ms Brown is waiting for him on the porch, and nods him in with a little wink, and a pat on the shoulder as he passes.

The Vuvalini are incredible. Many are still in their leathers, brown rags and dustridden, road-weary clothing underneath. Some have changed into flowing cloth, something between pants and dresses and wraps, layers and layers, beads and beads, mothbitten maybe, but a little powerful. He can smell sweat, and dirt, and exhaust, and maybe pot somewhere in the back of the house, and something spicy and fragrant cooking.

He makes for the kitchen to try to find Furiosa. It’s just as full of women, some sitting, some standing, in clusters of twos, threes and fours- he sees Dag’s white hair first, where she stands at the stove, getting a lesson in whatever it is they’re currently cooking, laughing and eating something off a spoon.

Another scan of the room, and then he sees Furiosa- and how incredible is it, he wonders, that a woman as extraordinary as her melts into a crowd? Any crowd, anywhere, in the history of the entire world? But she does it here. She’s sitting in a row of three women, with her bare, muscular arms on the table next to two sets just the same, as she laughs and shows off her scars to a much younger girl. The initiate, whose hair also razed off, is sitting across the table with her mouth open in shock, looking at the marks from that Rottweiler.

Furiosa glances up and catches sight of him, and Max gets to watch the moment where her just face lights up with recognition. She reaches out to him, unselfconsciously, inviting him in to their table to meet what he is rapidly coming to understand is her extended family.

\---

Like any extended family, it turns out that there are _stories._

“The _billboard,_ ” the oldest of them crows, “God, Fury, I’d forgotten how much you used to vandalize. Remember the time you beat that punk boy up for stealing your spraypaint?”

“Only because I’d asked him nicely and he wouldn’t drop it.” Furiosa defends, between bites of a lentil curry. “And I didn’t beat him up, I shoved him.” 

“Into a parked car.” The Vuvalini explains to Max. “Plus an extra punch to the throat, when he still wouldn’t drop the can. She’s always had a temper.”

“I was _twelve.”_

“Twelve!” The woman, Katie, she calls herself, cackles; “And him, with a mustache coming in, and a beard!”

“A patchy one.” Furiosa defends to Max, who is still just trying to picture it, and yes- he can, he absolutely can.

He squeezes her knee under the table, and finishes his drink, before getting up to go get another.

Directly in front of the fridge, two of the younger women are standing together, talking, hands a flurry. Max doesn’t realize he’s paused and watching until they catch him staring and turn, one giving him a look that is ready, nearly, to be hostile. Of course she is, he’s standing and practically gaping.

 _“Sorry,”_ he signs, the first word he’s put to his fingertips since Jessie died, glorious Jessie, brilliant Jessie, who deserves to be thought of more often, who taught Auslan to hundreds of pupils over the years he was lucky enough to know her, including to him. _“My sign is very rusty.”_

One opens her mouth in surprise, and the other grins, widely, ruefully, and tugs him in to the conversation with a flurry of questions he can hardly keep up with, she goes so fast. Painstakingly, carefully, he answers what he can.

He can’t look over his shoulder to check on Furiosa, or he’ll miss whole sentences, but Max thinks that he is probably making an all right accounting of himself tonight. These two seem to like him well enough, because one grabs his hand to tug him outside while the other explains that they’re going to go show him the names for specific bits of bike mechanics, since he admits that that is an area in which his vocabulary is lacking.

Max lets himself be pulled into the warm night air.

\---

“I’m going to have to learn how to ride one of these things.” Dag says, crouching down beside him as he looks over the bike. Max, standing because of that damn knee, glances over at her, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Got my first work contract and it’s a way outside town. Bike’s a good way to do it, and Ms Brown says I can have her old one.”

Max nods his approval. Dag has been flyering lately, putting her name and number out there as a landscape worker. She’s put together a couple of flower boxes, and even a flower bed for Debbie.

“You’ll need a truck,” Max corrects, because the work is going to involve moving plants from greenhouse to ground, at some point, “for the pots. Bushes.”

“Ted Gunderson says I can borrow his whenever I like, if I leave her with a full tank every so often and help his wife with the rosebushes now and again. Might buy it off him, when I can afford it.”

He thinks this over, and nods his approval.

“Valkyrie says that next month, they’re opening this place back up.” Dag admits, looking up over at the house. It takes Max a second to remember what she means, but yes, there are two vacant rooms right now. And a third, apparently, because she says; “I’m moving in with Ms Brown. Help her keep the place up, chip in on the housework as well as the gardening. It isn’t easy for her, with her back.”

Max guesses that if you believe Ms Brown has a bad back, she probably also has a bridge she’d like to sell you, but Max doesn’t say anything to that effect, just nods his approval.

“That means Toast’s going to begin looking for a place too- and Capable and Nux are probably going to have to move, since their place really doesn’t have room for them and the kid.” There’s a note of worry in her now, a note of melancholy. “You’re going to take care of Furiosa, aren’t you?”

Furiosa doesn’t _need_ taking care of. She does, however, like it, so Max nods an uncomplicated ‘yes,’ and starts translating, as the two Vuvalini begin to teach Dag the names of the parts of a motorcycle.

\---

Afterwards, much, much later, the most of them have scattered, to sleep in the beds upstairs or the couches, to the garden to talk quietly and smoke a little more, or to the front porch to sit out with a beer and watch the stars.

Someone clears their throat behind him, and Max turns- and this, he’s sure, is Valkyrie.

She’s thirty something, all in leather, with a ragged tangle of black hair that flies around her, sunburned and windburned a little raw. She smiles at him, wide, and with very white teeth, when she sees recognition in his face.

“We’ll get those in the morning. Come on, I hear you have a leg you’re supposed to stay off.”

“There’s a bench in the back of the garden.” Max answers, toweling his hands dry, and stepping away from the sink. Valkyrie smiles, and offers him her arm, to help him keep his balance as he limps, badly after a long day, up towards the back.

\---

“So, the lawyer, Corpus, is dead.” She ends, sitting beside him, with her hands tucked in her jacket pockets, and her feet stretched out in front of her, crossed together at the ankle.

“So are the People Eater and the Bullet Farmer. The rest of the crew seem to have been absorbed into other organizations- and with that, we’re fairly sure, your troubles have come to an end, my friend.”

Max nods his approval, and looks wonderingly up at the night sky. He hears a laugh from down the slope that he recognizes as Furiosa’s, and feels a deep, deep surge of relief.

“And Splendid?”

“We found her.” Valkyrie admits, a little more quietly, a little less smug. “She’s- she’ll get a burial. Furiosa will- I’ll tell her in the morning.”

Max hums a sorrowful agreement, and wonders about her, this girl who he never met, but who still feels as part of the environment as Nux or Capable or Ms Brown.

He doesn’t know how to answer that- he’s sorry it’s what they thought, he’s glad it’s finally over. Valkyrie works it out for him, and provides;

“It’s good that she’ll be able to rest.”

Max nods, and Valkyrie gives him a thoughtful look, taking him in head to toe. He doesn’t think there are any tests left to pass, but after what she’s told him today, about what she and her womyn did to Corpus, to the Bullet Farmer, the People Eater, he talks anyways.

“Seven- no, eight years ago, when I was a police constable, I got involved in a high speed car chase with a gang member. I ran him off the road and he was killed in the crash, and this leg happened. His friends decided they were coming after me and mine. It took them a couple of years to do it, once I got back from leave. They ran down my wife and our little boy.”

He clears his throat, and pushes on.

“He- it was instantaneous, but she was in the hospital for a few months after. Coming out of there, the night she did die, I met one of them on the road. He started up with me, and I chased him down, crashed him on purpose this time. The car was leaking gas. So. I cuffed him by the ankle to the frame. I arranged it so there was a well under the fuel leak, and I propped up a lighter below it, so he had a little time until it overflowed. I handed him the handsaw from the box in my trunk, and told him he’d get through the cuffs in ten minutes, and his ankle in five. I knew full well that the car was going to go up in two, two and a half, tops.”

It’s the most he’s said at once to a stranger in years. It’s the first time he’s ever told the whole story out loud. He uses no adjectives, gives the sparsest, fairest details that he can, and makes no excuses, and offers no apologies.

“Good.” Says Valkyrie, low and venomous and full of approval. “I’m going to have to get to know you, Max. You make a hell of a first impression.”

\---

Valkyrie and Furiosa decide to take the bed upstairs, only because Max can’t handle the staircase on his knee, and has had a little too much to get behind the wheel and try to drive home. Her couch is perfectly serviceable, and she installs him on it with more blankets than he will use, an extra pillow, and three or four good, long, apologetic kisses, like just taking the staircase up and away from him is unbearable. It's their first night out of one another's beds since it all happened, and this time around Max has the feeling that it's a habit he doesn't intend to take back up again.

They can talk in the morning. 

For now, though, he likes it down here, though. He’s napped here before, and anyways, he can just hear the quiet sound of two old friends honest-to-goodness giggling drifting down the stairs. It’s Furiosa at her most unguarded, drawn back a little into how she was as a girl, the way that being around people from old parts of your life pulls you steadily into their patterns.

He’s just thinking he might try to stay up a little while longer and listen, but then his head hits the pillow, and he thinks he'll just shut his eyes for a moment, and for tonight, that is it for Max.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for reading! This is the last full chapter of this story. Tomorrow comes a mid-large epilogue with where they all went next and more character details.
> 
> This is a spot for a couple of thank yous-
> 
> First of all to Vil, from dwrp, whose Max is lovely and the one who gave me my obsession with water glass condensation and probably influenced this in a lot of ways.
> 
> Second, to the many Australians who corrected me about currency, police titles, milk storage, and the like.
> 
> And last but not least, to everyone who reviewed along with both stories. Your delightful energy and enthusiasm lit a fire under me that moved these at the clip they went. Every single time you posted your favourite lines it pushed me to keep writing good turns of phrase- ngl my sleep schedule actually shifted earlier for this fic, as I got excited to wake up and post it, and that's because of you all! It's been a real slice.


	14. epilogue

Furiosa was secretly hoping they’d be able to get on the bike and go a year to the day that Max first started his shifts in Citadel. Unfortunately, four things stand in the way of that plan, and each delays their departure by a few more months;

One, his surgery, which takes place two weeks before that one year mark and involves a nasty amount of recovery, followup, and painkillers in the aftermath. Max is in no shape to do anything other than lie in bed and be brought trays of food and new books, and Furiosa certainly isn’t going to drag him along on a pilgrimage in this state. The trip can wait.

Two, moving houses. They do it all in one week, a huge deep clean and reshuffle, as soon as Max’s knee is well enough that he can handle staircases. Dag goes in with Ms Brown, as planned. Toast takes the little room above the coffee shop, because she isn’t ready to leave town yet, the rent is obviously great, and it’s the perfect size for her. Nux and Capable take over Max’s lease at the Millers. The Millers are thrilled to have a new family using the space, and come back to help with some of the transfer of possessions, since Max is mostly laid up and Capable is now heavily, heavily pregnant. As for Max, well, that’s a bit predictable, isn’t it? His coffee maker fits awfully well on Furiosa’s counter, and there’s a spot in her lane for his car.

Three, the birth of little baby Mel, who turns out to have her mother’s eyes and her father’s nose, and who doesn’t take the instantaneous hatred to Furiosa that other babies have traditionally taken. Who, more to the point, seems to want to _live_ tucked in one of Max’s broad arms. Furiosa loves the baby. Not so much that she makes some late in life bid at wanting one of her own, not by a long shot, but enough that she appreciates the sight of her and Max and quietly suggests that they can stick around for a few months more or so, save the trip until at least until the worst of the summer heat has broken.

Four, and most irksome by far, she loses her own coin toss, and it is decided that they will be taking Max’s Ford, not her bike- which is more practical, honestly, but a part of her had secretly been hoping.

By the time they finally, finally set out of Citadel, it’s a fall all over again. They have a full tank of gas and a duffel bag worth of not much at all stuffed in the trunk, plus a cooler of food, a thermos of fresh coffee. Furiosa’s excitement has returned in full force. She drums her hands on her legs, an excited and eager liftoff sound, and Max looks over from the wheel and grins a question at her.

“You’re going to let me drive this thing.” Furiosa explains, gleefully, because they’ve been together a year, a little more maybe, and still she hasn’t gotten behind the wheel of the great black beast. On a road trip like they’re planning there’s no helping having to share the driving load. Still, magnanimously, she allows, while she twists the handle to roll her window down; “You can take my bike out for a spin, when we get back.”

“Well,” says Max, a little louder than normal so she can hear him over the buffeting wind through the open windows, “in that case.”

Furiosa just crows, long, loud and triumphant, as they hit the straightaway and Max floors it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU EVERYONE. It's over, it's over, I'm so sad to see it go! 
> 
> I make no promises, but *may* be adding one-shots to this AU in the future. Nothing has clicked just right so far, but if you're curious about those please subscribe. This may never pan out, just because this story has resoundingly drawn to a total and utter close.
> 
> Still thank you for reading along with me this far!
> 
> (Also, please see the comments of this chapter for an outpouring of all the things that were 'too internet' to make it into this story or just had to be sawed out along the way for pacing, plus other extensive character notes!)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] two creams, one sugar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9101842) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




End file.
